Science & Technology

Stephen Hawking: 'there are no black holes'

By T.K. Randall
January 25, 2014 ·  88 comments

Black holes have puzzled physicists for years. Image Credit: NASA / Alain Riazuelo Well known for his work on the subject, the world-famous physicist is attempting to reconcile the behavior of a black hole under both basic gravitational theory and quantum theory to produce a single unified system.

According to Hawking, under gravitational theory the event horizon of a black hole is such that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Under a more recent quantum theory interpretation however, the event horizon of a black hole would instead be a seething mass of high-energy particles that would incinerate anything that it touched.Combining these concepts, Hawking came up with the idea of an "apparent horizon" with no fixed boundary, while re-branding the term "black hole" to the less absolute "grey hole".

"The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," he wrote. "There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field."

Source: The Register | Comments (88)

Tags: Stephen Hawking, Black Hole