Hawking’s 1974 calculation of thermal emission from a classical black hole led to his 1976 proposal that information may be lost from our universe as a pure quantum state collapses gravitationally into a black hole, which then evaporates completely into a mixed state of thermal radiation. Objections to this idea appeared as early as 1980, but it took two decades for the balance of opinion, including Hawking’s, to shift to the belief that information is not ultimately lost by black holes. The debate led to a lot of understanding of gravitational physics, so even if Hawking was originally wrong, it was a truly great mistake. (March 17, 2010). Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre.
Don Page is a Professor of Physics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. Growing up in Alaskan villages, he completed his high school education by correspondence through the University of Nebraska Extension Division. He received his B.A. in Physics and Mathematics, summa cum laude, from William Jewell College in Missouri, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Physics from the California Institute of Technology. His Ph.D. thesis, “Accretion into and Emission from Black Holes”, was supervised by Kip S. Thorne and Stephen Hawking. Dr. Page then moved to the University of Cambridge, England, where he held a NATO Postdoctoral Fellowship in Science, worked as a research assistant under Prof. Hawking, and received an M.A.