In the mid 1970s, Stephen Hawking made a string of unnerving discoveries about black holes—that they could evaporate, even explode, and destroy all information about what had fallen in. Physicists spent the next 40 years sorting through the wreckage. Then last year, at a conference in Stockholm, Hawking said that he and some collaborators were close to a solution to the so-called black-hole information paradox. Details, however, would have to wait.
Now the details are here—at least some of them. This week Hawking, the University of Cambridge physicist Malcolm J. Perry, and the Harvard University string theorist Andrew Strominger posted a paper online in which the authors claim to make real progress toward solving the black-hole information paradox. Despite the inviting title—“Soft Hair on Black Holes”—the paper is mercilessly technical, so I asked Strominger to walk me through it. An edited transcript of our conversation follows.
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