Interesting ideas there, but nothing Hawking says supports the idea that a rocket could be used to escape from inside the event horizon of a supermassive black hole. This was essentially a repeat of a lecture he gave at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, described
here.
For decades, physicists have been perplexed by the question of what happens to the information of particles passing through black holes. (Physicists define “information” to be all the properties of a particle—it’s a technical term not to be confused with its more universal meaning). Quantum mechanics says information can’t be permanently destroyed. But if information enters a black hole and cannot escape, then to all intents and purposes, it has been destroyed. And that seems to violate the laws of quantum physics.
So what’s the solution? Hawking now believes that the information never really enters the black hole to begin with.
“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” he said.
From the video description:
The event horizon is the sphere around a black hole from inside which nothing can escape its clutches. Hawking is suggesting that the information about particles passing through is translated into a kind of hologram – a 2D description of a 3D object – that sits on the surface of the event horizon. “The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,” he said. “Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.”
In the 1970s Hawking introduced the concept of Hawking radiation – photons emitted by black holes due to quantum fluctuations. Originally he said that this radiation carried no information from inside the black hole, but in 2004 changed his mind and said it could be possible for information to get out.
Just how that works is still a mystery, but Hawking now thinks he’s cracked it. His new theory is that Hawking radiation can pick up some of the information stored on the event horizon as it is emitted, providing a way for it to get out. But don’t expect to get a message from within, he said. “The information about incoming particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost.”
Serious, but not entirely serious.
by If photons can't escape from the other side of the event horizon, even if they are emitted directly away from he singularity, how could a rocket escape seeing as it can't accelerate to faster than the speed of light? And what difference do you think it makes being a super-massive black hole as opposed to a stellar-mass black hole?
