![]() ![]() The story is entertainment skirting the event horizon of parody Two of them told professor Raju in an email that he shouldn’t take the University of Sussex PR department too seriously since they were just “doing their job” and getting the science right was “only secondary”. Raju told him, “It would be demonstrably incorrect to attribute this insight to the recent work… it is not true, as the press release suggests, that this paper is the first to point this out… I think you can check this easily even as a non-specialist.”Įven more concerning than a journalist fixated on pumping up a story, some of the scientists concerned were not bothered that it was being misrepresented. He insisted to the BBC that this work didn’t represent a fundamentally new perspective, but Mr Ghosh kept pressing him to modify his response into one that would fit his story. He told them the press release “skipped over the state of the scientific field and claimed a dramatic result well in excess of what was claimed in the paper itself”. One of the world’s leading experts on black holes, professor Suvrat Raju of the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in India, was contacted by the BBC asking for comments. The result was not unexpected, and was known earlier, but the University of Sussex - the home institution for two of the authors of the paper - decided to aggressively publicise the research and called the BBC offering them an exclusive. It reported the limited finding that some information can get out of a black hole. It was not new and it did not directly address the information paradox. ![]() In October last year Professor Calmet and others published a paper on the internet about the black hole information paradox. The story was just too good, as they say, to let the facts get in the way. As the article was being prepared, the BBC was told again and again it wasn’t true, by a world expert in black holes. The scientists behind it knew this very well, and their institutions’ press office and journalists could have easily established that with a simple Google search. It was not a very well explained article but its deficiencies go deeper than that. The BBC quoted one of the authors of the recent work, Professor Xavier Calmet of the University of Sussex, saying “the problem has been cracked”. The new research said yes, information can escape because black holes have a newly recognised property named “quantum hair” - a subtle information trace around the black hole that somehow encodes what went into it. Quantum theory, which deals with the very small, says yes. Einstein’s general theory of gravity says no. Are such differences important? The twin pillars of modern physics disagree. Does information that goes into a black hole ever come out again, or is it gone from our universe completely? By information I mean the kind of object it absorbs: a star for example is arranged differently than a planet. One persistent problem has been their so-called information paradox. They are keepers of the fundamental secrets of space and time. This sorry tale shows how sloppy journalism, an overly pushy university PR department and even some scientists themselves conspired to produce a misleading story.īlack holes are keepers of fundamental secretsīlack holes are strange creatures made of folded space from which no light can escape. It was a science journalist’s dream - or it would have been if it had been true. Broad narrative strokes were required to support a black hole breakthrough solving a problem highlighted by the icon of all things difficult and profound, Stephen Hawking. With such attractive buzz words the actual story almost didn’t matter. Thus it was that BBC science correspondent of 24 years and honorary president of the Association of British Science Writers, Pallab Ghosh, got his hands on a scoop. If you are a science journalist, you seemingly can’t go wrong when you are handed an exclusive story that combines Stephen Hawking, black holes and a solution to one of the biggest paradoxes in science. ![]()
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