On Tuesday, Stephen Hawking and friends posted a new paper to the arXiv server. It has a great, or at least peculiar, title: "Soft Hair on Black Holes."
What in the great wide universe could that possibly mean? Glad you asked.
The subject of the paper is a deeply vexing problem known as the black hole information paradox. This is the conundrum that arises when we ask what happens to information as it falls into a black hole. Does it persist in some form or is it lost? We hope that it persists in accordance with the rules of quantum physics, which demand that the probabilistic information governing a quantum state not vanish, but that sure doesn't seem to be the case.
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