Particle Creation by Black Holes (1975)
Paper showing black holes emit thermal radiation at a temperature inversely proportional to their mass
Science · Maths, astronomy, medicine & more
Stephen Hawking
1942–2018 · British
Cosmology — black holes and quantum gravity
Stephen Hawking was a British theoretical physicist and cosmologist at the University of Cambridge, where he held the Lucasian chair once occupied by Isaac Newton. His 1974–75 demonstration that black holes should emit thermal radiation and slowly evaporate, now called Hawking radiation, was a landmark in combining quantum mechanics with general relativity. He also became one of the best-known public faces of science, continuing to work for decades after developing motor neurone disease.
How to spot them
- ▸Hawking radiation: black holes emit thermal radiation and evaporate
- ▸Born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, 300 years to the day after Galileo's death
- ▸Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (1979), a chair once held by Newton
- ▸Ashes interred in Westminster Abbey near Newton and Darwin; the memorial stone carries his black-hole temperature formula
- ▸Played by Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC drama Hawking (2004)
Key discoveries & works
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973)
Advanced monograph on general relativity, co-written with George Ellis
Properties of Expanding Universes (1966)
Cambridge PhD thesis, supervised by Dennis Sciama; put online in 2017 and downloaded millions of times
Black hole area theorem (1971)
The total horizon area of black holes can never decrease, echoing the second law of thermodynamics
No-boundary proposal for the wave function of the universe (1983)
Quantum cosmology proposal developed with James Hartle
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)
Collection of popular essays
Key ideas
- Black holes have a temperature and entropy (the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy, proportional to horizon area)
- Black hole evaporation raises the information paradox: what happens to information that falls in?
- Small primordial black holes from the early universe could be evaporating today
- Singularity theorems show that general relativity predicts breakdowns of spacetime under broad conditions
Quick-fire facts
- •Born 8 January 1942 in Oxford; died 14 March 2018 in Cambridge, aged 76
- •Studied physics at University College, Oxford, before postgraduate work at Cambridge
- •Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at 32, in 1974
- •Appointed CBE in 1982 and Companion of Honour in 1989
- •Awarded the Copley Medal (2006) and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009)
- •Held a party for time travellers in 2009, sending out the invitations only afterwards; nobody came
- •Long a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge
- •His memorial stone in Westminster Abbey was dedicated on 15 June 2018
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Sources
- Westminster Abbey — Stephen Hawking