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Sourced from "The Australian" July 2004

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AFTER nearly 30 years of arguing that a black hole gobbles everything within it - including traces of its own existence - physicist Stephen Hawking has done an intellectual backflip.

Next week at a conference in Dublin, the wheelchair-bound Oxford University academic will recant his controversial "black-hole paradox".

It's an idea he first proposed in 1976 and involves the complicated physics of black holes, or dense objects such as what remains when some stars run out of fuel and collapse under their own weight.

Leading cosmologist Paul Davies, of Macquarie University's Australian Centre for Astrobiology, heard rumours earlier this year about Dr Hawking's intellectual conversion. "Evidently, something has caused him to change his mind, but he's being very coy about what it is," Professor Davies said yesterday.

Even the organisers of the 17th International Conference on General Relativity know little of what the great thinker will say or why he's saying it. "He sent a note saying, 'I have solved the black hole information paradox and I want to talk about it'," said Curt Cutler, chairman of the conference scientific committee.

Dr Hawking's paradox begins with the notion that the gravitational pull of black holes is so great nothing escapes from them.

Nothing, that is, except "Hawking radiation", the energy emitted by the gravitational field around a black hole. The radiation "erases" information about matter inside the black hole, turning it into the cosmological equivalent of "white noise", Professor Davies said.

When the hole vanishes, he explained, so does the information, violating the laws of quantum physics which say that the information can never be destroyed.