Stephen Hawking Published a Paper Claiming There Are No Black Holes

Stephen Hawking, space iconoclast, is now saying that these space-regions do not actually gobble and space-crush (industry term) everything that enters them:

In a paper posted online, the physicist, based at the University of Cambridge, UK, and one of the creators of modern black-hole theory, does away with the notion of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole, beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape. In its stead, Hawking’s radical proposal is a much more benign “apparent horizon”, which only temporarily holds matter and energy prisoner before eventually releasing them, albeit in a more garbled form.

Hawking’s theory addresses Joseph Polchinski’s “black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years.”

In a thought experiment, researchers asked what would happen to an astronaut unlucky enough to fall into a black hole…. Physicists had long assumed the astronaut would happily pass through the event horizon, unaware of his or her impending doom, before gradually being pulled inwards — stretched out along the way, like spaghetti — and eventually crushed at the ‘singularity’, the black hole’s hypothetical infinitely dense core. But on analysing the situation in detail, Polchinski’s team came to the startling realization that the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern particles on small scales, change the situation completely.

The scientist is now calling his long-standing Hawking radiation theory his “biggest blunder.”

[Nature]