July 22, 2004
On The Astrophysics Front
Hawking Fills World In on Theory of Black Hole Blowouts
The world of astrophysics was sent spinning yesterday when Professor Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University mathematician, backtracked on his 30-year-old theory about black holes.Posted by Ithildin at July 22, 2004 11:55 AM | PROCURE FINE OLD WORLD ABSINTHEHawking, something of a modern-day Einstein, turned his original theory on its head when he revealed that black holes, the mysterious massive bodies formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume but instead eventually fire out matter and energy "in a mangled form."
His radical theory was presented in a paper to the seventeenth International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin.The document capped a three-decade struggle to explain an elemental paradox in scientific thinking: how can black holes destroy all traces of consumed matter and energy, as Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form?
