Is there a way to escape from a black hole? According to Stephen Hawking, the father of theoretical cosmology as we know it, yes, there certainly is.

The author of "A Brief History of Time" and the subject of the Oscar-winning biopic The Theory of Everything proposed his theory at at the Hawking Radiation Conference at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. During his presentation, Hawking presented a new theory: that the "information" about physical objects, i.e., their physical information, somehow dodges falling into a black hole entirely by being picked up by Hawking radiation, or black body radiation emitted by black holes.

While black holes — stars that have collapsed into themselves and whose star mass has created an inescapable gravitational pull that light cannot even escape from — are commonly known outside of the cosmology set, they're not as set in stone as the general public might think. Quantum physicists and general relativity physicists have been debating about it for a few years shy of half a century as part of a clash known as the "black hole information paradox" — while the former say that it is impossible for information to be destroyed, the latter says that, like anything that enters a black hole's point of no return, it is shredded up completely.

Hawking's statement that "there are no black holes" was sensationalized last year — and inasmuch, it wasn't entirely portrayed accurately: what the scientist was speaking of was the concept of the "event horizon," which in general relativity signifies a point of no return, as mentioned above. Hawking posited that the term should be switched out and be replaced by the "apparent horizon," which would more or less propose that some things can indeed escape, like light.

Hawking first argued that light photons would be unable to escape the unbreakable pull of a black hole back in the 1970s but changed his mind in 2004, more or less siding with quantum mechanics.

"The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles," said Hawking. "Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost."

Via New Scientist

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