Q: What do you think was the most important physics idea to emerge this year?

We won't know for a few years.

What about the recent discovery that teleportation of very small particles is actually possible? Will we one day be able to whisk ourselves through space the way they did on "Star Trek"?

The "Star Trek" version is bogus, but there's a sense in which Hawking radiation -- the light and particles that come out of black holes -- escapes by teleportation.

Speaking of black holes, you recently confessed that you had made an error in your famous theory about them.