Remembering Stephen Hawking ’s Greatest Scientific Accomplishment — and My Famous Bet Against Him

I’m glad to write about Stephen Hawking for Time because Stephen spent much of his scientific career thinking and writing about time. Time was his thing. Stephen studied time from the perspective of Einstein’s theory of gravitation, the general theory of relativity. One of his early achievements was proving that time had a beginning — that the laws of physics as we now understand them must have broken down very early in the history of the universe, at the Big Bang. Stephen also greatly advanced our understanding of black holes, where gravitational forces are so strong that time comes to an end. He argued forcefully that travel backward in time is disallowed by the laws of physics, which (as he put it) “makes the world safe for historians.” No one understood time better than Stephen Hawking. Stephen’s greatest scientific achievement was a discovery about black holes in 1974 that shook the world of physics. According to Einstein’s theory, nothing — including light — can escape from inside a black hole. That’s why it’s black. But Stephen found that black holes are not really completely black. Instead, due to the subtle consequences of quantum physics, they emit what we now call Hawking radiation. That insight ignited a controversy that still rages 44 years later, regarding what happens to information that falls into a black hole. If I drop my highly confidential diary into a black hole, will it be lost forever fr...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized onetime remembrance Source Type: news