THE media lapped it up when Stephen Hawking admitted that black holes do not destroy everything that falls into them, contrary to what he鈥檇 said 30 years ago. But his colleagues were disappointed at the lack of specifics.
On 21 July he began his talk at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin Ireland by saying, 鈥淚 think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics.鈥� But he tantalised his audience with concepts rather than mathematical calculations, and physicists in the audience were far from convinced.
鈥淚 didn鈥檛 get that 鈥榓h-ha鈥� experience,鈥� says John Baez, a mathematical physicist from the University of California at Riverside. Theoretician Joseph Polchinski from the University of California at Santa Barbara was even more blunt: 鈥淲e don鈥檛 understand it,鈥� he said.
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However, Hawking kept the television crews and journalists happy by conceding a famous wager. He and Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena had bet against John Preskill, also of Caltech, that black holes never reveal information about what falls into them.
Hawking told the conference that information from black holes does leak out 鈥渋n a mangled form鈥�. To honour his bet, he presented Preskill with an encyclopaedia of baseball. Thorne, however, is not ready to concede. 鈥淚 am choosing to hold off on the bet until I see more details in the manuscript that I understand will be forthcoming in the next month or so,鈥� he says.