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RECORDED IN LIGHT A ring of light surrounds the boundary of a black hole in this artist illustration. Stephen Hawking theorizes that light on this boundary encodes information about everything that falls into the black hole.

Light sliding along the outside of a black hole is the key to understanding what’s inside, Stephen Hawking says.

The proposal from the world’s most famous living physicist, presented August 25 at a conference in Stockholm, is the latest attempt to explain what happens to information that falls into the abyss of a black hole. Losing that information would violate a key principle of quantum mechanics, leading to what’s known as the information paradox.

Hawking and two collaborators claim that the contents of a black hole are inventoried on a hologram on its boundary, the event horizon. Unlike previous descriptions of this hologram, the researchers say, their proposal lays out a specific mechanism for storing information that applies to every black hole in the universe. “This resolves the information paradox,” Hawking said in his presentation at the Hawking Radiation conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

 

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