For a scientist whose career was made by his work on black holes, it might seem a little confusing to read that Stephen Hawking now thinks that they don’t exist. But that’s what “Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes”, the study Hawking published last week on arXiv, says: “there are no black holes”.
While this might seem surprising – after all, there’s a huge amount of (indirect) evidence that black holes exist, including a massive one several million times the mass of our Sun at the centre of the Milky Way – it’s really not. It’s Hawking’s latest attempt to solve a paradox that he, and other astrophysicists, have been grappling with for a couple of years.
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