Although it certainly isn’t a present threat at this point in spacetime, the fear of falling into a black hole haunts many of us. No one could possibly survive the inescapable pull into nothingness. However, physicist Stephen Hawking seems to think otherwise.

Appearing at the Hawking Radiation conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Hawking suggested that you could resist the gravitational force of a black hole by being stored in a two-dimensional hologram on the event horizon.

In this conference dedicated to the information loss paradox, Hawking offered his insights on the contradiction of a black hole. According to general relativity, the physical state of matter would be absorbed by the black hole. However, this goes against quantum mechanics that says the information of a physical object at one point in time should define its state at any point in time.

Hawking theorizes that quantum information wouldn’t disappear because it wouldn’t even enter the black hole. A 2D hologram possibly encodes the quantum mechanical information in the field surrounding a black hole, otherwise known as an event horizon. Hawking referred to these holograms as super translations.

“The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles. Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.

However, this preserved information would appear in disarray, Hawking stated. This is pretty much not that great if you’re ever in that situation. “For all practical purposes the information is lost.”

In addition to his theory about super translations, Hawking did speculate on what could possibly happen if one would fall into a black hole. His hypothesis does appear to be hopeful as long as you’re cool with existing in an entirely different dimension.

“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this might be possible. The hole would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe. But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that.”

Source: KTH