http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/4887935.html

After 29 years of thinking about it, Stephen Hawking says he was wrong about black holes.

The renowned Cambridge University physicist presented a paper Wednesday arguing that black holes, the celestial vortexes formed by collapsed stars, preserve traces of objects swallowed up and eventually could spit bits out "in a mangled form." Last week, in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corp., he revealed he had changed his long-held thinking on black holes.

Hawking's radical new thinking caps his 30-year struggle to explain a paradox in scientific thinking: How can objects "disappear" inside a black hole and leave no trace, as he long believed, when subatomic theory says matter can be transformed but never destroyed?
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