POSTED 1.04.2018
WHY BLACK HOLES ARE NOT COMPLETELY BLACK
The cosmologist and mathematician Professor Stephen Hawking (Jan 8 1942 – March 14 2018) is considered one of the greatest scientists of his generation. His book “A Brief History of Time” has sold millions. But he never lived to see his universal theory of everything finally proven.
While famed for his progress on investigating the nature of black holes it was just when they were being discovered throughout the universe that he reversed his own findings.
Far from being ground down forever into a whirling mass of atoms, Hawking deduced that energy may linger somewhere on the surface of the boundary between the outside and inside of a Black Hole known as the event horizon.
As a natural successor to Einstein, Hawking was committed to furthering Einstein’s general theory and his work on gravity, space and time as well as exploring the origins of the universe.
But he was also investigating the quantum theory that the universe was made up of infinitesimally small entities which behave in unpredictable ways.
Hawking was the first to unite these two conflicting theories after being drawn into what Einstein called ripples in space time or gravitational waves where light bends in space time.
Hawking was inspired by the fact that not only was he born on the anniversary of Galileo’s death (1642) but he also succeeded Isaac Newton as Lucasion Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University.
It was Newton who first discovered a universal force while watching an apple falling. He worked out that this force kept planets from wandering off into space and people fixed to the earth and called it gravity after the latin word gravitas” or weight.
Einstein was contemplating a falling lift when he concluded that acceleration and gravity were equivalent like mass and energy. He found gravity meant distortions in space and time.
Einstein found that light beams are bent by gravity and won the Nobel prize for his studies on the nature of light and wave particles.
By contrast Hawking showed by mathematical equations that the two theories of general relativity and quantum physics could explain the nature of black holes and supergravity.
Einstein said: “God Does Not Play Dice”
Niels Bohr said: “Stop Telling God what to do with his dice”
Hawking said: “God did not create the Universe. Gravity did.”
Refs:
“A Brief History of Time” Stephen Hawking Bantam Press
“Stephen Hawking. A Life in Science” Michael White and John Gribbin Viking
“The Theory of Everything” Film of life of Stephen Hawking
Copyright Mica Jay