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I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes. If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe but in a mangled form which contains the information about what you were like but in a state where it can not be easily recognized. It is like burning an encyclopedia. Information is not lost, if one keeps the smoke and the ashes. But it is difficult to read. In practice, it would be too difficult to re-build a macroscopic object like an encyclopedia that fell inside a black hole from information in the radiation, but the information preserving result is important for microscopic processes involving virtual black holes.

Stephen Hawking#10

PhysicsInformationScience fiction

About this quote

What does it mean?
Black holes do not allow travel to other universes; information is preserved but scrambled, like burning an encyclopedia.
In plain terms
You can't travel through black holes, and information inside gets messy but isn't lost.
What can you take from it?
Information preservation in black holes is theoretical but not practical for travel.

Where it applies

  • science fiction writing
  • physics study
  • debate

Putting it to work

  • understand data loss
  • study quantum physics

Questions to consider

  • Is information truly never lost?
  • What does this mean for reality?

Another view

The analogy oversimplifies complex quantum gravity issues.

More from Stephen Hawking

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  2. So Einstein was wrong when he said 'God does not play dice'. Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that He sometimes con…

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  3. Although September 11 was horrible, it didn't threaten the survival of the human race, like nuclear weapons do.

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