Enough talking about Hawking, I would think. There are a bunch more newspaper stories out there (including these from Newsday and the New York Times that were nice enough to quote me). Also, Juan Maldacena and I appeared together today on Odyssey, the program hosted by the very same Gretchen Helfrich who will soon be our official guest-blogger. No quid-pro-quo was involved, I promise. You are welcome to listen to the program if you have RealAudio.
Just to show you that scientists don’t always agree, two representative quotes. First, Leonard Susskind in the Times:
Until Stephen’s recent reversal, he was about the only person still getting it wrong.
Susskind is a string theorist who thinks that it’s already been figured out, nothing to see here, time to move on. Next, from my colleague Bob Wald:
Hawking is completely revising his prior belief that what goes into a black hole is washed out. Now he believes that anything emitted from a black hole can be identifiable back to its source. He’s running away from what we still believe.
Wald is a general-relativist, quite skeptical about the claimed mechanisms for getting the information out. This is the problem with thought-experiments; they’re not nearly so conclusive as actual experiment-experiments.