Stephen Hawking: Black Holes Could Be Portals To Another Dimension

INQUISITR.COM / Science
By Sandra Hajda
Published on: 2016-04-21T21:36:18
stephen hawking

Eminent physicist Stephen Hawking has challenged the widely accepted notion that black holes are “eternal prisons” that suck matter into their depths, never to be seen again.

Hawking stated that black holes may in fact be portals to other dimensions, according to AOL news.

“Things can get out of a black hole, both from the outside and possibly through another universe.”

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The physicist made his comment this week at Harvard’s Sanders Theater. The event was to mark the inauguration of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, a program that aims to join experts and focuses specifically on black hole research.

“If you feel you’re in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.”

Hawking reflected that black holes suck in and hold any matter that comes near them, therefore, they must be “storing” an incredibly large amount of space garbage in their depths.

Hawking wondered how this is possible. The physicist declared that the question of exactly how black holes are able to store so much information is a great mystery. He also stated that physicists are working hard to unravel the mystery.

Hawking compared black holes to the hard drive that stores information on a computer. He said that, given the sheer mass of matter they absorb, black holes are the “most efficient hard drives in the universe.”

“Hawking spoke through the robotic voice of his computer, his long silences punctuated by a combination of jokes and ponderous thoughts about the universe.”

The physicist went on to acknowledge a flaw in his own hard drive metaphor. Hawking admitted that the matter sucked into a black hole will lose many of its original properties (it will be crushed, or compressed) and, therefore, it is not completely accurate to say that everything that was ever sucked into a black hole has been “stored away” like files on a hard drive.

However, he made the following intriguing remark, suggesting that remnants of all that space junk may still exist somewhere, and an analyst would just have to know how to “read” it, much as a scientist trained to carbon-date items can analyze their properties using a sophisticated technique.

“It’s like burning an encyclopedia. The information is not lost, if you keep all the ashes. But it’s difficult to read.”

It’s not the only controversial remark the physicist has made recently.

BBC News reports that Hawking believes that the human race may not be around for more than another 100 years. The author of A Brief History Of Time told an audience that he believes humanity could seal its own doom during the next century. Disasters likely to befall us include nuclear war, global warming, and the spread of genetically engineered viruses, according to Hawking.

Hawking is not optimistic about humanity’s chances of getting out of such self-made conundrums. He stated that further progress in science and technology will create “new ways things can go wrong.”

Hawking made one hopeful remark — he stated that if humanity manages to build colonies on other worlds, it may be able to survive.

“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years…By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race…However, we will not establish self-sustaining colonies in space for at least the next hundred years, so we have to be very careful in this period.”

(Image via NASA/JPL-Caltech)