Theos-Talk Archives (August 2004 Message tt00700)

Hawking admits being wrong 
From: http://www.sophists.org/article348.html

The famous physicist admits he was wrong about black holes - and pays off a long-standing wager
By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

For days the scientific grapevine had been buzzing with the news that Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist whose disease has put him in a wheelchair, heir to the revered Cambridge professorship once held by Isaac Newton, would be making a big announcement at a conference in Dublin, Ireland. Sure enough, last week before an array of TV cameras and hundreds of colleagues at the ordinarily obscure International Conference of General Relativity and Gravitation, Hawking declared that he had solved what he called "a major problem in theoretical physics." Black holes, he said, do not forever annihilate all traces of what falls into them.


In making that announcement, Hawking recanted a position he had held for nearly 30 years. He also pulled the rug out from under a generation of science-fiction fans, declaring dead a favorite plot device. "There is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said, with evident regret. And, finally, he conceded defeat in a long-standing bet with Caltech astrophysicist John Preskill, who thought there wasn't a problem in the first place.



P.S. Dennis Tate take notice!

Andrew W. Smith
"He has seen but half the universe who never has been shown the House of Pain." --- Ralph Waldo Emerson

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