Conference Update wrote:Hawking's answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from whence they came.
Previously, Hawking, 62, had held out the possibility that disappearing matter travels through the black hole to a new parallel universe -- the very stuff of most visionary science fiction.
"There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe," Hawking said in a speech to the conference.
"I'm sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes," he said.
"If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state."
At that point, the audience of about 800 people, including many of his peers, laughed.
I guess like others, we'll have to wait for the written report sometime next month before getting the details, but it still seems to me that Hawking is saying that a black hole eventually degrades to the point at which it can no longer maintain an event horizon, and it begins to leak previously stored (and now mangled) matter/energy.
I would like to know how it disintegrates exactly, how long it takes to get to the point of disintegration, and how it regurgitates its contents once it fails. Why did Hawking say, "As black holes disintegrate, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from whence they came". Was he being poetic, or does the matter/energy somehow flood back into the universe in an even spread? This could be a dramatic find.
Hawking radiation (described by Hawking years ago) relied on unmatched quantum particles, some of which appeared outside the event horizon while their counterparts appeared inside the event horizon (thus the leakage of quantum radiation). However, this doesn't seem to imply that any mass is being lost from the black hole, and unless mass is lost somehow, I can't see how the event horizon will every fail.
Unfortunately, I haven't a clue if this was what Hawking alluded to when he said, "degradation and disintegration" of black holes. 
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