In 1997 the three cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist — that is, whether the interior of a black hole is changed at all by the characteristics of particles that enter it.

It now looks like Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne may owe John Preskill a set of encyclopedias of his choice, since physicists at Ohio State University ‘have derived an extensive set of equations that strongly suggest that the information continues to exist — bound up in a giant tangle of strings that fills a black hole from its core to its surface.



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