Hawking shatters science fiction fans’ fantasy

FAMED astrophysicist Stephen Hawking yesterday revealed his new theory that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume but instead eventually fire out matter and energy “in a mangled form”.

Professor Hawking’s radical new thinking was presented in a paper to the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin.

It capped his three-decade struggle to explain an elemental paradox in scientific thinking: How can black holes destroy all traces of consumed matter and energy, as Prof Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form?