Hawking sheds new light on black holes
"A black hole only appears to form but later opens up and releases information about what fell inside. So we can be sure of the past and predict the future"
According to current theory, Hawking radiation contains no information about the matter inside a black hole, and once the black hole has evaporated, all the information within it is lost.
However this conflicts with a central tenet of quantum physics, which says that such information can never be completely wiped out.
Hawking said that the recapturing the information had important philosophical and practical consequences.
"We can never be sure of the past or predict the future precisely," he said. "A lot of people wanted to believe that information escaped from black holes but they didn't know how it could get out."
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