Stephen Hawking gave his talk yesterday, the media came and went, and now the interpretations are beginning to trickle onto the web. The transcript — apparently the actual text Hawking’s computerized voice read, minus the visuals — is here. The New York Times has by far the best reporting I’ve read. Physics Forum has a thread (scroll to the end), and several blogging physicists chime in here, here, here and here.

The upshot, by consensus, is that Hawking’s proposal is a way to resolve in the semi-classical regime a paradox that is no longer a problem in the quantum regime, where the real search is now on for a mechanism whereby black holes release the information they contain back to the rest of the universe as they fritter away — with several viable options in the running.

In other words, most physicists in the field have long accepted that black holes have entropy and that this information is released back to us — not forwarded into other universes — as black holes die out. Besides denying science fiction writers convenient plot devices, what Hawking is doing is reconciling the advances quantum approaches have given us with the more “traditional” way of describing black holes.

His method is to postulate that, when observing a black hole from far away (in other words, when we look at the complete picture), it’s never possible to be sure what kind of black hole we’re looking at, or if it is a black hole at all. It’s a situation analogous to the famed double-slit experiment — easily the bizarrest thing I’ve ever experienced first-hand — where photons, having gone through either the left slit or the right slit, and detected individually, still aggregate to a classical interference pattern. So it goes with black holes, according to Hawking: They look like black holes from a classical perspective, but we can’t be sure, because of quantum uncertainty, what kind they are precisely — sometimes, they are pseudo black holes of the variety that do allow information leakage. When we collect all these possible black holes into the composite classical black hole that we see from afar, enough of them allow for information leakage to resolve the paradox. Or so says Hawking, in my limited understanding via other observers, most of whom seem slightly skeptical of the mathematical gymnastics in his talk.

In a way, this is a catch-up maneuver for Hawking, and one more vote in favor of the inviolability of the basic laws of physics. The search for a theory of quantum gravity just got a little easier.