One of the most vexing questions in physics is what would really happen if you fell into a black hole? Now, a new radical theory, proposed by famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking, may finally solve this challenging puzzle.

Black holes really not engulf and destroy the ‘physical information’. Instead, the information is stored in alternative universes.

This is the new idea proposed by professor Stephen Hawking in a meeting organized by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up, there’s a way out,

Hawking said.

Quantum mechanics states that everything in our world is encoded with information about its constituent particles’ quantum states. And according to this law, the information is eternal, it cannot disappear forever, no matter what happens, not even if it gets sucked into a black hole. This is known as the ‘information paradox.’

The ‘information paradox’ has puzzled scientists for decades. While quantum mechanics says that nothing can ever be destroyed, general relativity says it must be.

However, Hawking’s new theory may solve this puzzle. In the so-called Hawking Radiation Conference, organized by UNC physicist Laura Mersini-Houghton, Hawking presented his latest idea.

I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect but on its boundary, the event horizon

The event horizon is the sphere around a black hole — so, in other words, whatever is falling into a black hole can escape because it doesn’t actually make it inside

The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles,

he said.

Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.

So, while the information is not technically lost, it is preserved in a “chaotic, useless form,

Hawking added.

For all practical purposes, the information is lost.

At the conference, Hawking also offered compelling ideas about what happens to the stuff that does fall into the black hole?

They travel down a one-way path, eventually winding up in a different universe.

The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that,

Hawking said.

The message of this lecture is that black holes … are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.

Bootome line: As we understand them, black holes are regions of space-time that are born after stars collapse into themselves, creating a ‘point of no return’ that swallows anything that comes too close. Not even light can escape, because their gravitational pull is so infinitely powerful.

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Conference’ video: Youtube.

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