July 21, 2004

A couple of things from the BBC

First is Steven Hawking says that infomation can get out of black holes, which is a dramatic shift from the eariler view that once something with information encoded in it falls into a black hole the information it carries is destroyed. From reading the article it seems that once a Black hole has lost most of it's mass through emitting Hawking Radiation it will "Open Up" and lose it's event horizon allowing the information that it swallowed to escape. This is opposed to the end that Hawking originally theorised, that the radiation output would continuw increasing until it finally disappeared in a blast of Gamma rays taking all the information that it swallowed with it.



Secondly a team of six New Zealand schoolboyshas made a cheap portable mobile phone detector, which they sell at about £15 each. The range is 30m and it only detects intensity not direction, but at that price just by two and correlate the differences in intensity to get direction. Nice project, if a bit scary in implicaions considering the number of people that carry mobiles at all times, and are therefore carrying a cheap tacking device at all times as well.