Well, there may be a way out of Black Holes after all.  That’s good news for those of you who have been worried that you might be out riding your bike one day and accidentally fall into one.  Actually that would only be possible if you had some kind of space bike.  Black holes are the remains of stars that have died and collapsed in on themselves into a small core, creating a gravitational pull that overwhelms all other forces.  Well, for some time, the prevailing theory has been that the gravity of a black hole is so intense that nothing, not even light, can pass through it.  Since that makes them invisible, it takes a large space telescopes fitted with special tools just to find a black hole. The special tools determine how stars that are very close to black holes act differently than other stars.

Now, British scientist Stephen Hawking is proposing that physical information could survive and pass through a black hole.  For those of you who only know people through Hollywood movies, he is the subject of the film The Theory of Everything which won the Best Actor Oscar last year for Eddie Redmayne.  For those of you who still can’t place him, he is the scientist in a wheel chair that can only speak through a device that makes him sound like a robot.  Anyway, he’s considered pretty smart.  Speaking at a conference in Stickholm, Sweden, recently, the scientist said black holes could not swallow and destroy physical information, as Einstein’s theory of relativity would predict.

Addressing the paradox between quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity on where information goes in a black hole, Hawking proposed that information is encoded as 2D holograms at a black hole’s outer perimeter which would then allow them to pass through the hole.  The Cambridge professor also suggested that black holes could provide passage to new universes.

On the lighter side, Hawking added, “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out. The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”

Hawking and his colleague Professor Andrew Stromberg from Harvard University, propose that information in black holes is stored as 2D holograms, known as super translations, which contained “all the information that would be otherwise lost”.  “The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary – the event horizon,” Hawking said, referring to the outer perimeter of the object, which represents its point of no return.

The theory presented at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology seemingly resolves the contradiction between Einstein’s belief that information entering black holes is destroyed and the rules of quantum mechanics, which hold that informa-tion is eternal and so cannot be destroyed.  Hawking also suggested that some black holes could provide an exit, or gateway, to alternate universes. “The exis-tence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible…the hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to ano-ther universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe,” he said.

And then he added, “So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.”