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"There are no black holes," argues noted physicist Stephen Hawking in a short paper [published in
Nature](https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761), claiming we need to redefine the phenomenon.
The paper is titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes", and addresses a paradox where classical theory states that no energy or information can pass a black hole's "event horizon", whereas quantum physics suggests it can.
Hawking's solution to this dilemma is that rather than destroying information and energy, black holes release it back into space in a new form. He proposes a new boundary to replace the event horizon - an "apparent" horizon that fluctuates with quantum effects". "There are no black holes," the pre-print paper concludes, "in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity."
The response from other physicists has been cautious however.
Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at Berkeley, told Nature News: "The idea that there are no points from which you cannot escape a black hole is in some ways an even more radical and problematic suggestion than the existence of firewalls."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
