On Evaporating Black Holes

Tim Maudlin, Ph.D. Professor
New York University, USA

Hawking’s discovery of the radiation named after him led to the hypothesis that black holes can shrink and eventually evaporate entirely. That conclusion, in turn, gave rise to the so-called “information loss” paradox. I will argue that there is not, and never has been such a paradox, and that the worries about black hole evaporation have been based on both a mathematical error and on conceptual confusions about the meaning of temporal locutions in a relativistic setting.