Famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking's black hole theory has allegedly been solved by a Michigan State University researcher, Indo-Asian News Service reported.
"In 1975, Hawking discovered that black holes are not all black. They actually radiate a featureless glow, now called 'Hawking radiation'," professor Chris Adami from Michigan State University said.
Hawking concluded his original theory by claiming that the black hole is slowly consumed by the radiation, which then makes any information evaporate and disappear in order to have it be irretrievably lost.
Referred to as the information paradox, Hawking's theory created a fundamental problem, IANS reported.
"According to the laws of quantum physics, information cannot disappear," Adami said. "A loss of information would imply that the universe itself would suddenly become unpredictable every time the black hole swallows a particle. That is just inconceivable. No law of physics that we know allows this to happen," he explained.
However, if the strong gravitational pull of the black hole sucks in the information and vanishes completely, how are the laws of quantum physics able to be preserved?
"The solution, Adami said, is that the information is contained in the stimulated emission of radiation, which must accompany the Hawking radiation - the glow that makes a black hole not so black," according to IANS.
With the information that has been swallowed, stimulated emission makes the black hole glow.
"Stimulated emission is the physical process behind LASERS (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). Basically, it works like a copy machine: you throw something into the machine and two identical somethings come out," Adami said.
"If you throw information at a black hole, just before it is swallowed, the black hole first makes a copy that is left outside. This copying mechanism was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1917, and without it, physics cannot be consistent," the Michigan State professor said.
According to Paul Davies, cosmologist at Arizona State University, "Adami has correctly identified the solution to the so-called black hole information paradox. Ironically, it has been hiding in plain sight for years."
Hawking has constantly revised his theory over the years. In January 2014, he revealed that event horizons - the invisible boundaries of black holes - do not exist, IANS reported.
"Stephen Hawking's wonderful theory is now complete in my opinion. The hole in the black hole theory is plugged, and I can now sleep at night," Adami claimed in the study published in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
