Cosmology
Hairy Black Holes
No, not what you first thought but a solution to Hawking’s Paradox
Hairy Black Holes
A catchy phrase, yes, but an apparent solution to a paradox first identified by Stephen Hawking.
Those of you who read my stories will know that I don’t often write about cosmology although I read a lot about it, even studied it once. So why write this?
Well, the reason is that the solution to this paradox provides a link between quantum theory — which allows for the escape of information from black holes as Hawking theorised — and Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which does not permit such escape.
This hairy concept could take us one step nearer to that all embracing Grand Unified Theory.
In the 1960s an idea called the “no hair theorem” was developed by Prof John Archibald Wheeler of Princeton University in New Jersey. He used the words because, in general terms, a black hole is featureless — or bald. His theorem fell into the abyss, but the ‘hair’ notion stuck in people’s heads.
Physicists’ hair was standing on end at the prospect of the theories of either Quantum Mechanics or General Relativity being wrong at root. But now an apparently soothing lotion is on hand for them
