Have Scientists Finally Made Sense of Stephen Hawking's Famous Black Hole Formula?

Slashdot reader sciencehabit shares this report from Science magazine:Fifty years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in materials. The arguments for black hole entropy were indirect, however, and no one had derived the famous equation from the fundamental definition of entropy - at least not for realistic black holes. Now, one team of theorists claims to have done so, although some experts are skeptical. Reported in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters, the work would solve a homework problem that some theorists have labored over for decades. "It's good to have it done," says Don Marolf, a gravitational theorist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the research. It "shows us how to move forward, that's great."

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