Noted physicist Stephen Hawking has made a stir in the scientific world after he published a paper claiming that black holes might not exist at all. Experts are now closely studying if he might have been right all along.
In the paper release Jan. 22 titled Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes, the 73-year old physicist claimed that light may be able to pass through black holes and that black holes might be able to leak whatever they consumed before in another form of matter.
This became a confusing literature for many physicists because Stephen Hawking was one of the pioneers of the black hole paradoxes. In his earlier literatures, Hawking described black holes as areas where nothing, not even light, can escape. Now, his new proposal suggests that although black holes are probably able to suck in other materials, these materials might find a way back and that the black holes can only hold them for a temporary period of time.
"There are no black holes - in the sense from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking wrote in his paper.
CBC News was able to interview some experts to know their reactions about Stephen Hawking invalidating his previous "black hole" discovery.
Associate professor from the University of Toronto and theoretical physicist Amanda Peet said to CBC, "It's majorly provocative. It's saying there's no 'black' in black hole. He's sort of saying the hole is grey instead, not just absorbing everything. It's a very radical departure from past ideas."
She further described the paper a bit "cryptic" presenting no calculations supporting his new theory.
Another expert on gravitational waves expert and faculty member at the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics Harald Pfeiffer commented that Hawking may have changed his theories about black holes because his earlier assumptions oppose the concepts for quantum theory.
"The conflict is that with quantum mechanics, you're never destroying information," he said to CBC. "If information gets completely lost and falls into a black hole, there's no way of reversing this. So either Einstein's theory of relativity is incomplete, or quantum mechanics is incomplete."
Hawking's paper claims that physicists today should focus their attention on "apparent horizons" rather than event horizons. Apparent horizons are areas where information can be stored for some time and not forever, as what's previously theorized for event horizons.
