Stephen Hawking (RIP) Explains His Revolutionary Theory of Black Holes with the Help of Chalkboard Animations
Stephen Hawking died last night at age of
76. I can think of no better, brief social media tribute than that from
the @thetweetofgod:
“It’s only been a few hours and Stephen Hawking already mathematically proved,
to My face, that I don’t exist.” Hawking was an atheist, but he didn’t claim to
have eliminated the idea with pure mathematics. But if he had, it would have
been brilliantly elegant, even—as he used the phrase in his popular 1988
cosmology A
Brief History of Time—to a theoretical "mind of God."
Hawking himself used
the word “elegant,” with modesty, to describe
his discovery that “general relativity can be combined with quantum
theory,” that is, “if one replaces ordinary time with so-called imaginary
time.” In the bestselling A
Brief History of Time,he described how one might possibly reconcile the
two. His search for this “Grand Unified Theory of Everything,” writes
his editor Peter Guzzardi, represented “the quest for the holy grail of
science - one theory that could unite two separate fields that worked
individually but wholly independently of each other.”
The physicist had to
help Guzzardi translate rarified concepts into readable prose for bookbuyers at
“drugstores, supermarkets, and airport shops.” But this is not to say A
Brief History of Time is an easy read. (In the midst of that
process, Hawking also had to learn how to translate his own thoughts again, as
a tracheotomy ended his speech, and he transitioned to the computer devices we
came to know as his only voice.) Most who read Hawking’s book, or just skimmed
it, might remember it for its take on the big bang. It’s an aspect of his
theory that piqued the usual creationist suspects, and thus generated
innumerable headlines.
But it was the other term in Hawking’s subtitle, “from the Big Bang
to Black Holes,” that really occupied the central place in his extensive body of
less accessible scientific work. He wrote
his thesis on the expanding universe, but gave his final lectures on black
holes. The discoveries in Hawking's cosmology came from his intensive focus on
black holes, beginning in 1970 with his innovation of the second law of black
hole dynamics and continuing through groundbreaking work in the mid-70s that
his former dissertation advisor, eminent physicist Dennis Sciama, pronounced “a
new revolution in our understanding.”.. read more:
