Stephen Hawking; "You can't get there from here"

Astrophysicist, Stephen Hawking, who once said matter falling into a black hole traveled to a parallel universe has had a change of heart.

Hawking unveils new thinking on black holes.

Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Wednesday that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume and instead can fire out matter and energy "in a mangled form."

Hawking's radical new thinking, presented in a paper to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, capped his three-decade struggle to explain an elemental paradox in scientific thinking: How can black holes destroy all record of consumed matter and energy, as Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form?

Hawking's answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from which they came.

Hawking's ideas on black holes and worm holes served as the seed for many science fiction novels, making travel to alternate universes a common plot line.

"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," he said.

I will be curious to see how Patrick Nielsen Hayden reacts to this.