"Hawking’s Last Paper: Black Holes Have “Soft Hair”" Topic

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In summary, previous to Hawking it had been thought that black holes were essentially identical— they were "bald," meaning that just as it's much harder to individually identify men who have no hair (because a distinguishing feature of hair is absent), it wasn't thought possible to say that one black hole had any distinguishing difference from any other black hole; they "had no hair." Hawking, however, established that, in fact, black holes had a temperature, and further more that they this temperature meant they were expelling radiation into space (just as everything with a temperature does) and would eventually evaporate. But that left the problem of what the heck happened to the stuff that fell into a black hole? How could that mass just "disappear?" This paper establishes that black holes have "soft hair," or emit photons at the event horizon that may be the answer to what happens to matter and energy consumed by a black hole.
(And, honestly, that's about as much as I understood!) The paper isn't definitive; it's a pointer to a path that may eventually provide the solution that allows a black hole to both evaporate AND not destroy the "quantum information" of the matter and energy it takes in. (Heady stuff, which is why Hawking was a physicist and I am not.)

In any case, enjoy the article!

This reminds me of the old "Is Hell exothermic or endothermic".
I don't believe the story behind it; it's just too cute.
But it's fun.
Especially the proof that Therese Banyan has still not slept with that student.

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Were Hawking's hairy "holes" done with spray or a roll-on? Or with a brush?

Dan
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Hey John, I liked that link better than the one about the Black Holes.