Hawking concedes the information bet
At the seventeenth International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Stephen Hawking announced that he now believed information escapes an evaporating black hole after all, conceding the 1997 wager he and Kip Thorne had made against John Preskill and paying the agreed forfeit, a baseball encyclopedia. Thorne did not concede. The argument Hawking offered was not widely accepted as a resolution, and the problem remained open; the episode is included because it is often reported as the moment the paradox was settled, which it was not.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- The black hole information paradox · concept · not located
- Stephen Hawking · person · United Kingdom · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse
Argues that black hole evaporation destroys information and therefore conflicts with the unitarity of quantum mechanics. V55 VERIFICATION BASIS: not consulted in session; no research tool was available. Volume and page are from recall and must be checked.
Physical Review D · 1976 · Partly verified
S. W. Hawking, Physical Review D 14, 2460 (1976)
Recorded on The black hole information paradox
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.