“I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.”
- January 8, 1942 – March 14, 2018
- British
- Theoretical physicist, science writer
- Announced the black hole singularity theorem and Hawking radiation, and contributed to the popularization of science with his book “Talking about the Universe”
Quote
“I used to think information was destroyed in black hole. This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science.”
Explanation
In this quote, Stephen Hawking reflects on one of the most significant revisions in his thinking about black holes and information theory. Initially, Hawking believed that information that fell into a black hole was lost forever, a view that seemed to align with the predictions of general relativity. According to this perspective, once something crossed the event horizon of a black hole, it was irrevocably lost to the universe. This idea became a cornerstone of the black hole information paradox.
However, in the 2000s, Hawking dramatically changed his stance on this issue, acknowledging that his earlier belief was incorrect. The paradox arose because it contradicted one of the central tenets of quantum mechanics, which states that information cannot be destroyed. This was a profound challenge to physicists, as it seemed to create a conflict between the laws of general relativity (which govern large-scale objects like black holes) and quantum mechanics (which governs the behavior of particles at the smallest scales). Hawking’s original theory appeared to suggest that black holes could violate the fundamental principles of quantum theory.
In later years, Hawking proposed that the information that falls into black holes is not destroyed but is instead encoded on the event horizon, in a process now known as “Hawking radiation”. This insight helped move the field forward and prompted new theories that seek to reconcile the tension between general relativity and quantum mechanics, especially in the quest for a theory of quantum gravity. Hawking’s admission of this “blunder” not only illustrated his intellectual honesty but also marked a key moment in the history of modern theoretical physics, showing how scientific understanding evolves and how major breakthroughs often arise from revisiting earlier assumptions.
