Escape plan #56 has been aborted.

Last week Stephen Hawking declared at the International Conference of General Relativity and Gravitation that his theory on the disappearance of matter in black holes—a position he has held for 30 years—is wrong.

Remember how all matter is supposed to disappear forever into a black hole when it is formed (when a star collapses into itself) and then after using up all its energy, the black hole dissipates? And that any matter that passes the event horizon (the threshold after which it becomes pulled into the gravitational field of the black hole) is forever lost? Well according to Hawking’s new theory, all matter is in fact not lost in black holes—it does escape and return to the universe, albeit in a mangled form.

This solves the conundrum facing scientists for the past 30 years—the impossibility of reconciling Hawking’s previous theory with a basic rule of quantum theory—that information cannot be destroyed. Hawking’s previous model attempted to explain this problem by postulating that the information sucked into black holes was not destroyed, but possibly sucked into a parallel universe.

So if it’s true, Hawking’s new theory, while solving the problem of where the disappearing matter goes, also extinguishes the hopes of a world of science-fiction geeks like myself: there is no longer a possibility of traveling through parallel universes in space-time by jumping into a black hole. Damn, there goes my plan of escape from law school.

I haven’t been able to find articles that explain his new theory on a more academic level—particularly, since the concept of the event horizon is now extinguished, what about the concept of a singularity? Event horizons lead back, the old theory went, inexorably to a singularity, a single point in space-time where all information was forever locked. Are there no singularities anymore either? The new theory seems to imply this, no? If so, then what of the Big Bang (which is supposed to have originated, as all universes are, as a singularity in space-time)? Does this mean we are moving on to string theory and never looking back? What about Michio Kaku's theories on hyperspace, are some of them discounted if this new model proves more convincing? I’d really like to know. If any of you see interesting articles on the subject, I'd appreciate you sending them my way.