I Exist, Therefore, Probably I Don't...

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Today I caught a YouTube short - caveat, I normally hate short-form video chaff, but as this was Professor Brian Cox, I gave it my attention - on black holes. He talked about the now famous Hawking Radiation, posited by Stephen Hawking, and the equation for which is carved into Hawking's tombstone in Westminster Abbey, where he lies alongside Sir Isaac Newton, among other such luminaries. The thing about Hawking Radiation is that, because it represents an emission of energy in the form of heat, it indicates that, ultimately, a black hole will deplete to nothing, losing the the enormous amount of 'information', in the form of matter, that the gravitational 'beast' has hitherto attracted to itself, beyond the event horizon that glows in the very radiation that Hawking's equation exposes. As Cox pointed out, this is the only place in the physical universe that allows the annihilation of 'information'. I imagine that as our universe came from nothing - no-thing - the converse would also hold true: all that is will ultimately become no-thing. Fred Hoyle didn't hold with this notion, but there you go: at the moment, the cosmological consensus appears to be that no-thing is a thing: or not...

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