THE media lapped it up when Stephen Hawking admitted that black holes do not destroy everything that falls into them, contrary to what he’d said 30 years ago. But his colleagues were disappointed at the lack of specifics.
On 21 July he began his talk at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin Ireland by saying, “I think I have solved a major problem in theoretical physics.” But he tantalised his audience with concepts rather than mathematical calculations, and physicists in the audience were far from convinced.
“I didn’t get that ‘ah-ha’ experience,” says John Baez, a mathematical physicist from the University of California at Riverside. Theoretician Joseph…
