Dublin (where I happen to be on vacation) promises to be the scene of some pretty revolutionary physics next week, because Stephen Hawking has asked at the last minute to speak at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation being held here, claiming to have solved the black hole information paradox, one of main puzzles facing those toiling on quantum gravity.

By far the best context I’ve seen for what Hawking might say can be found on pages 93-94You need to register with Amazon.com, but when you do you can read those pages. (If you need to, do a search for “unruh”). of Lee Smolin’s most excellent (as in you really should read this book instead of other popularizations, including the rather mediocre stuff Hawking himself has written) book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Those few paragraphs set the stage for the question Hawking purports to have answered: If black holes have entropy, how do they store this information? According to classical physics, this information is destroyed, which would break the second law of thermodynamics.

One possible solution was offered by Samir Mathur a few months ago, using string theory. What will Hawking sayUpdate 17/07: More hints here.? His conference abstract is suitably baffling. Will he flesh out Mathur’s approach, or come up with a completely new model — perhaps an equivalent solution using another theoretical base? Or will he be wrong? (It’s happened before.)