When does hype become a fib?
By Brian Clegg
Every now and then I have to complain about science magazines. I understand that the headline writers need to grab readers’ attention, but there is a difference between making something interesting, and clickbaity hype. But the most recent one I’ve seen crosses the line into something worse.
Most hyping headlines use weasel words like ‘may’, ‘might’ or ‘could’. That’s bad enough but in the teaser for Apple News illustrated someone at BBC Science Focus ventured into actual untruths to give us ‘We’re finally about to discover what’s lurking inside a black hole.’ (Guess what: we’re not.) Don’t get me wrong – I like the magazine, and I’ve written for it quite a few times. But there is no weaselling here – the discovery is presented as an imminent fact.
Admittedly when we get to the article Beyond the Event Horizon by Georgina Torbet, the subhead takes us a little back from the brink with ‘Scientists may have found a way,’ though that ‘may’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And the piece itself (very near the end) includes the words ‘We’re nowhere near being able to perform this kind of experiment yet,’ though, as we will see, this too is a massive understatement. But that teaser is a genuine error.
It’s worth mentioning the theoretical concept to put this into context. Physicist Luca Iliesiu has suggested a way to, in principle, find out more about what’s going on inside a black hole – according to theory usually considered impossible. I suspect the theory could be challenged, but even if it’s correct, let’s be clear. No one outside of science fiction is ever going to do this.
To make it happen, you first have to fly out to a black hole – the nearest known one is 1,560 light years away, so it’ll take a while to get there – and then surround the whole thing with sensors so efficient that you can track in detail every Hawking radiation photon that leaves the environs of the black hole.
I’m not totally convinced about this bit even if the tech was possible. Iliesiu is quoted as saying ‘Suppose you had access to all the radiation. You knew exactly the state of each photon at every moment in time. You could then ask, would it be possible to reconstruct whatever happened in the black hole interior from that radiation?’ But is actually possible to know the state of each photon at every moment in time? I thought this wasn’t possible with quantum particles?
It’s a fun speculation, but it is never going to happen, let alone ‘about to’.
Image from Apple News
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/05/when-does-hype-become-fib.html
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