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Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein calculated the entropy of a black hole in the 1970s, but it took physicists until now to figure out the quantum effects that make the formula work
By Leah Crane
An artist’s visualisation of a black hole
varuna/Shutterstock
We finally understand how black holes get their entropy. Physicists have been struggling to figure this out since the early 1970s, when Stephen Hawking and Jacob Bekenstein calculated how much entropy, or disorder, should be present in a black hole. Now, with a little help from quantum mechanics, researchers may have finally solved the problem.
“For a long time, people have thought that to solve this problem, you have to do all kinds of fancy things in string theory. But what we show is…
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