Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking (English pronunciation:/sti wandervın_шh/мkě/( listen); Oxford, January 8, 1942-Cambridge, March 14, 2018) was a theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, cosmologist and British scientific divultor. His most important work consisted of contributing, together with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding the time-space singularities in the framework of general relativity and the theoretical prediction that black holes would emit radiation, which is now known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes Bekenstein-Hawking radiation). One of the main characteristics of his personality was his contribution to scientific debate, sometimes publicly gambling with other scientists. The best known case is its participation in the discussion on the conservation of information in black holes.

He was a member of the Royal Society of London, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the United States National Academy of Sciences. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1979 until his retirement in 2009.

Among the numerous distinctions bestowed upon him, he received twelve honoris causa doctorates and was awarded the Order of the British Empire (CBE degree) in 1982, the Prince of Asturias Award for Concord in 1989, the Copley Medal in 2006, the Freedom Medal in 2009 and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2015.

He was married twice and had three children. Just before his first marriage, at the age of 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which worsened over the years, leaving him almost completely paralyzed and forcing him to communicate through a device voice generator. He has been the longest-lived person with this disease, surviving 55 years, when the average life expectancy is approximately 14 months His case is "fascinating" and puzzling for neurologists.

As an author of informative books on science, he achieved enormous best-sellers, in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general, such as A Brief History of Time: from the Big Bang to Black Holes (A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes), from 1988, and which was on the British The Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks, A Briefer History of Time, from 2005, in collaboration with Leonard Mlodinow, in which he tried to explain the History of the Universe as simply as possible, which is why it was He knew him as The Historian of Time or The Historian of the Universe, and The Universe in a Nutshell i>, 2001.

Biography

Early years and education

Hawking's parents fled London due to the constant bombings that the city suffered by Germany during the Second World War

She was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, the place where her parents, Isobel Hawking and Frank Hawking, a biological researcher, moved expressly, seeking greater security for the gestation of their first child, since London was being attacked by the Luftwaffe. He also had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward.

After Stephen's birth, the family returned to London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. In 1950 they moved to St Albans, where he attended St Albans Girls' High School (which admitted boys up to the age of ten) and at the age of eleven switched to St Albans College, where he was a good if not brilliant student.

At first, Hawking wanted to study mathematics at University, inspired by his professor, but his father wanted him to study at University College, Oxford, as he had done. As there was no mathematics teacher at that time, the college did not accept students in that discipline, so Hawking enrolled in the natural sciences and got a scholarship. Once at University College, he majored in physics, his interest at the time centered on thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. While at Oxford, he was on a rowing team, a sport he claimed helped alleviate his terrible boredom at university. His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said in The New York Times Magazine: "It was enough for him to know that something could be done and he was capable of doing it without looking at how others did it... Of course, his mind was completely different from that of his contemporaries."

Hawking's academic habits were far from impressive, as evidenced by his final examination result bordering on first and second class honours, necessitating an "oral examination". Berman said of the oral test:

And by the way, the examiners at that time were smart enough to realize they were talking to someone much smarter than most of them.

After receiving his undergraduate degree from Oxford in 1962, he did his postgraduate studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He earned his PhD in physics from Cambridge in 1966, which would be followed in her lifetime by more than a dozen honorary degrees.

Career

From 1962 to 1975

Hawking at Cambridge.

Hawking with rope theorists David Gross and Edward Witten.

Shortly after arriving in Cambridge, he began to develop symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neuron disease that would cause him to lose most of his neuromuscular control. During his first two years at Cambridge he did not recognize himself, but after the illness stabilized and with the help of his doctoral tutor, Dennis William Sciama, he returned to work on his PhD in physics.

In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge colleague Roger Penrose applied a complex new mathematical model created from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. This led to Hawking, in 1970, to prove the first of his several singularity theorems, which provide a series of sufficient conditions for the existence of a spatiotemporal singularity in spacetime. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities that only appear in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.

Hawking was one of the youngest to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1974. That same year, he visited the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) to work with his friend, Kip Thorne, who taught there. Hawking would continue to have a relationship with Caltech, spending one month a year there from 1992 until his death.

From 1975 to 2018

His work with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel, and D. Robinson was an endorsement of John Archibald Wheeler's no-hair theorem, which postulates that every black hole is completely described by its properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. After analyzing gamma-ray emissions, Hawking suggested that tiny primordial black holes formed after the big bang. Along with Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole thermodynamics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes must thermally create and emit subatomic particles, what is now known as Hawking radiation, until they use up their energy and evaporate. Hawking published in the same year, together with Bernard Carr, the hypothesis of the existence of primordial black holes that were formed by the extreme density of the universe at the beginning of its expansion that would represent all the dark matter in the universe.

In 1983, Hawking developed in collaboration with James Hartle a topological model of the universe, called the Hartle-Hawking State, according to which the universe would have no boundaries in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical models of the big bang by a similar region, the North Pole: you cannot travel north of the North Pole as there is no limit. Although the frontierless proposal initially predicted a closed universe, discussions with Neil Turok made him realize that the absence of borders is consistent with an unclosed universe.

In 2006, together with Thomas Hertog of CERN, Hawking proposed a theory based on top-down cosmology, according to which the universe did not have a single initial state and, therefore, the Physicists should not claim to formulate a theory that explains the current configuration of the universe on the basis of a particular initial state.

Hawking was the Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, from 1979 until his retirement on 1 October 2009. He would later become Director of Research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. He was also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and held the Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.

In 2009 he participated in a tribute to Carl Sagan sponsored by Jack White's label, Third Man Records. On sale on November 6, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the astronomer's birth, "A Glorious Dawn" is based on excerpts from Sagan's popular program Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, set to music by John Boswell and to the Hawking's voice has been added.

Death

On March 14, 2018, at the age of 76, he died at his home in Cambridge, United Kingdom, according to a statement released by his family, the content of which is collected by several English media. They did not reveal the cause of death, they simply mentioned that he "expired in peace".

Work

According to Stephen Hawking, in the black holes the second principle of the thermodynamics is violated, which led to speculations about travel in space-time and wormholes.

Hawking worked on the basic laws that govern the universe. Together with Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's general theory of relativity implies that space and time must have a beginning in the big bang and an end inside black holes. Such results point to the need to unify General Relativity with quantum theory, the other great scientific development of the first half of the XX century. One consequence of such unification that he discovered was that black holes were not totally black, but could emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edges or boundaries in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began is completely determined by the laws of science.

His numerous publications include The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime with G. F. R. Ellis, General Relativity: Einstein Centennial Review with W. Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W. Israel. Stephen Hawking has published three popular books: his bestseller A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Black Holes and Small Universes and Other Essays, in 2001 The Universe in a Nutshell, in 2005 A Brief History of Time, a version of his homonymous book adapted for a wider audience.

Investigation of the universe

Research on the origin of the universe

In his book Black holes and small universes and other essays, published in 1993, he stated:

Science could claim that the universe had to have known a beginning (...) Many scientists did not like the idea that the universe had a beginning, a moment of creation.

Stephen Hawking

In the primitive universe is the answer to the fundamental question about the origin of everything we see today, including life.

Stephen Hawking

Around 2004 he proposed his new theory about black holes or pits, a term usually applied to the remnants of stars that suffered a gravitational collapse after using up all their nuclear fuel.. According to Hawking, the universe is practically full of "small black holes" and he believes that these formed from the original material of the universe.

About the origin of the universe, he also stated that:

In the classical theory of general relativity [...] the principle of the universe has to be a singularity of density and curvature of infinite space-time. Under these circumstances they would cease to govern all known laws of physics (...) The more we examine the universe, we discover that in no way is arbitrary, but obeys certain well-defined laws that operate in different fields. It seems very reasonable to assume that there are unifying principles, so that all laws are part of some larger law.

Stephen Hawking

Timeline protection conjecture

Hawking claimed there should be a law that made time travel impossible. He proposed a chronology protection conjecture that excluded time travel from the laws of physics, to "make history safe for historians." Unable to find a physical law that would make time travel impossible, Hawking changed his mind:

Perhaps the journey in time is possible, but it is not practical.

Philosophical thought

Hawking adopted “the positivist view that a physical theory is only a mathematical model and there is no point in asking whether or not it corresponds to reality. All one can ask is that their predictions agree with reality." For Hawking the idea that a physical theory or picture of the world is a model and a set of rules that relate elements of the model to observations.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is only a set of rules and equations. [...] The usual method of science to build a mathematical model cannot answer questions of why there must be a universe that is described by the model.

Based on the fact that what is known of modern physics makes it difficult to defend realism and David Hume's view that there is no choice but to act as if reality is true, so it is "meaningless" ask if a model is real or not; it only makes sense to ask whether or not it agrees with the observations", deriving from the fact that if there are two models that agree with the observations "it cannot be said that one is more real than the other" and that the most suitable model could be used accordingly. to the considered situation. Regarding the model term, it would be considered satisfactory if:

1. It's elegant,
2. contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements,
3. in accordance with existing observations and provides an explanation of them, and
4. it makes detailed predictions of future observations that will allow to refute or fake the model if not confirmed.

Religious beliefs

Stephen Hawking in Jerusalem (2006)

In the book A Brief History of Time, from 1988, the astrophysicist pointed out that «if we were to discover a complete theory, it would be the definitive triumph of human reason, because then we would know the mind of God". However, over the decades these ideas were changed, reinterpreted and even received accusations of being just publicity, according to Hawking's first wife, Jane Wilde, after their divorce in 1991.

Indeed, Stephen Hawking used the word "God" repeatedly in his public discourse of popular science, but he explained that he did so in a purely metaphorical sense. I am not religious in the normal sense of the word. I believe that the Universe is governed by the laws of science. Those laws could have been created by God; but God does not intervene to break the laws."

In 2010, the scientist stated in his book The Grand Design, that modern physics rules out God as the creator of the universe, just as Darwinism did in the past, which overthrew the ideas of God as creator of living beings. According to excerpts from his book The Grand Design, Hawking stated that a new series of theories makes it superfluous to think of the existence of a creator of the Universe, that God did not create the Universe and that the big bang was the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics.

Since there is a law like that of gravity, the Universe could and was created from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason that there is something in place of nothing, is the reason why the Universe exists, that we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God as the one who lit the fuse and created the Universe.

Stephen Hawking

The publication of excerpts from the book The Grand Design he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, in which he basically stated that God did not create the Universe, caused strong controversy and criticism from scholars. representatives of numerous religions.

It was in this context that, in 2014, in an interview conducted by the newspaper El Mundo, he clarified his position regarding religion and cleared up any doubts about his atheism. He was clear in pointing out that he was an atheist and that he considered science and religion incompatible:

In the past, before we understood science, it was logical to believe that God created the Universe. But now science offers a more compelling explanation. What I meant when I said that we would know "the mind of God" was that we would understand everything that God would be able to understand if it existed. But there is no God. I'm an atheist. Religion believes in miracles, but these are not compatible with science.

Stephen Hawking

Personal fight against amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

Stephen Hawking is an example of fighting and dignity in front of the ELA. Photo at the National Library of France (22 May 2006)

In 1963, at the age of 21, he was diagnosed with a type of motor neuron disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The first symptoms appeared during his stay in Oxford, just before his first marriage. Stephen Hawking was left in a situation of disability due to this disease, which worsened his condition over the years, leaving him almost completely paralyzed, but it did not prevent him from maintaining his high scientific and public activity.

Hawking survived 55 years with the disease, although doctors had given him two years to live. From the time of ALS diagnosis, the average life expectancy is approximately 14 months, and most of patients does not exceed five years.

In 1985 he underwent a tracheotomy, and has since used a voice synthesizer to communicate. He gradually lost the use of his limbs, as well as the rest of his voluntary muscles, including the strength of his neck to hold his head up; with all this his mobility became practically nil. The wheelchair that he used in public was controlled by a computer that he operated through slight movements of the head and eyes. With the voluntary contraction of one of his cheeks, he composed words and phrases in his voice synthesizer; his deteriorating condition led to him only being able to communicate at the rate of one word per minute. In this regard, at the end of 2011 he requested technical assistance from the company Intel to improve the word prediction system.

Sir Martin Rees, who was named a real astronomer by the queen, confessed to me once Hawking's disability prevents him from doing the tedious calculations necessary to stay in the head of his research area. That is why it focuses on generating new and fresh ideas rather than making difficult calculations, which can run your students.

Michio Kaku

On April 20, 2009, it was reported that Hawking had been admitted "very ill" to a Cambridge hospital. A few hours after the news broke, his personal website displayed a message referring to the avalanche of visits he had suffered, with which they had been forced to omit its contents temporarily to avoid a server crash.

The next day, April 21, 2009, they reported his improvement and the possibility of his speedy full recovery.

Hawking was an exceptional case, not only because he was the person who survived the longest with ALS, breaking all the statistics, but also because his disease seemed to have "burned out" and its progress slowed, becoming relatively stable. For all these reasons, it has become a "fascinating case" and puzzling for neurologists.

Hawking was of the opinion that the variety of ALS he suffered from was probably caused by malabsorption of vitamins. When his disease had progressed to the point where he was unable to swallow and had begun to choke on eating, he began a diet without gluten-free, dairy-free, sugar-free, vegetable oil-free, and processed foods free. She supplemented her diet with daily vitamin and mineral supplements, including folic acid, vitamin B12 and other B vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, zinc, and cod liver oil capsules. After some time into the diet, it began to include small amounts of dairy products.

Acknowledgments

Hawking experiencing ungravity on a NASA Boeing 727 plane.

The then President of the United States Barack Obama speaks to Hawking (accompanied by his daughter Lucy) in the White House Blue Room, before the ceremony in which he would be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom along with 15 other people, August 12, 2009.

A statue of Hawking by Ian Walters was unveiled at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge on December 19, 2007. Buildings named in his honor include the Stephen W. Hawking Center in San Salvador, the Stephen Hawking Building in Cambridge, and the Stephen Hawking Center at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. In 2002, after a UK-wide vote, the BBC included it in its list of 100 Greatest Britons.

Main awards and distinctions

• 1966: Adams Prize awarded by Cambridge University, shared with Roger Penrose.
• 1974: Elected member of the Royal Society of London.
• 1975: Medalla Eddington.
• 1976: Medalla Hughes, granted by the Royal Society "for his distinguished contributions to the application of general relativity to astrophysics, especially to the behavior of highly condensed matter".
• 1979: Albert Einstein Medal.
• 1981: Medalla Franklin.
• 1982: Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• 1985: Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
• 1986: Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
• 1987: Dirac Prize for its contributions to theoretical physics.
• 1988: Wolf Prize in Physics
• 1989: Member of the Commonwealth Honorary Companions or Kingdoms of the Commonwealth Community Order.
• 1989: Prince of Asturias Award of Concordia.
• 1998: Andrew Gemant Award awarded by the American Institute of Physics.
• 1999: Naylor Award awarded by the London Mathematical Society.
• 1999: Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Award of the American Physical Society
• 1999: Alberto Award, awarded by the Royal Society for the Promotion of Arts, Manufactures and Trade of London.
• 2003: Michelson Morley Award at Case Western Reserve University
• 2006: Copley Medal of the Royal London Society
• 2008: Fonseca Award of the University of Santiago de Compostela
• 2009: Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civil decoration in the United States.
• 2012: Special Prize for Fundamental Physics, is the most economical scientific award in the world.
• 2015: BBVA Foundation Award for Knowledge in Basic Sciences together with Viatcheslav Mukhanov, to discover that galaxies have their origin in quantum fluctuations.
• 2016: Honorary Professor of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias.

Posts

Selected Works by Stephen Hawking

Scientific and informative

• 1969: Singularities in Collapsing Stars and Expanding Universes with Dennis William Sciama, Comments on Astrophysics and Space Physics Vol 1 - 1
• 1973: The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with George Ellis, ISBN 0-521-09906-4
• 1988: Brief history of time: from the Big Bang to the black holes (A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes), Bantam Press, ISBN 0-553-05340-X)
• 1993: Black holes and small universes and other trials (Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays)Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-37411-7)
• 1996: The Nature of Space and Time with Roger Penrose, Michael Atiyah, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-05084-8)
• 1997: The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Roger Penrose), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-56330-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-521-65538-2 (paperback), Canto edition: ISBN 0-521-78572-3
• 2001: The universe in a nut shell (The Universe in a Nutshell)(Bantam Press 2001) ISBN 0-553-802-X)
• 2002: On the shoulders of giants, the great texts of physics and astronomy (On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy)(Running Press) ISBN 0-7624-1698-X)
• 2003: The Future of Spacetime, Critical Editorial.
• 2005: Information Loss in Black HolesCambridge University Press.
• 2005: Brief History of TimeBantam Books, ISBN 0-553-80436-7)
• 2005: God created numbers: the mathematical discoveries that changed history (God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History), Running Press, ISBN 0-7624-1922-9)
• 2007: The theory of the whole: the origin and destiny of the universe
• 2008: The great illusion: the great works of Albert Einstein
• 2009: The Cosmic Treasure
• 2010: The Grand Design with Leonard Mlodinow
• 2018: Brief answers to the big questions

Children's Fiction

These works are co-written with his daughter Lucy Hawking.

• 2007: The Secret Key of the Universe -George's Secret Key to the UniverseRandom House ISBN 978-0-385-61270-8)
• 2009: The Cosmic Treasure -George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-1-4169-8671-3)

Films, documentaries and series

• Secrets of the Universe (BBC)
• A brief history of time (A Brief History of Time)
• The Universe of Stephen Hawking (Stephen Hawking's Universe)
• Hawking's paradox -Horizon (BBC TV series): The Hawking Paradox)
• Masters of science fiction - Masters of Science Fiction)
• Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe
• Superhero Movie he performs a parody where he is played by Robert Joy.
• In the universe with Stephen Hawking -Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking)
• Hawking (BBC) where Stephen is played by Benedict Cumberbatch (2004)
• God really created the universe? (Did God Create The Universe?) that was the first episode of the TV series of the Discovery Channel string called Curiosity, being Stephen, the main presenter of the episode, and in which he explains the reasons why, believing in the existence of a creator god of the universe is a useless exercise.
• The Big Bang Theory where you briefly interpret yourself in a chapter (fifth season) and in another you only hear your voice (six season) 2012.
• The theory at all A film based on Stephen Hawking's life, focusing on his love, personal life, and especially the overcoming of his illness. (2014)

A list of Hawking's 2002 publications can be found on his website.

• The Magic Godfathers is hired by Remy to help Timmy and so check that 2+2=5 is correct.
• The Simpsons He interprets himself.
• Futurama He interprets himself.
• David Blaine: Real or Magic He interprets himself.

Music Videos

• Hawking appears in some of the musical videos that make up John Boswell's Symphony of Science:A Glorious Dawn», «The Poetry of Reality (An Anthem for Science)», «The Big Beginning» and «The Quantum World»

Literature about Stephen Hawking

• Kitty Ferguson (1992). Stephen Hawking: his life and his work: he made a theory of everything. Criticism. ISBN 978-84-7423-557-9.
• David Filkin (1998). The Universe of Stephen Hawking. Gedisa. ISBN 978-84-7432-668-0.
• Peter Coles (2004). Hawking and the mind of God. Gedisa. ISBN 978-84-9784-033-0.
• Francisco J. Soler Gil (2008). The divine and the human in the universe of Stephen Hawking. Christian Editions. ISBN 9788470575365.
• Jane Wilde Hawking (2008). Travelling to Infinity – My Life with Stephen. Alma Books. ISBN 1-84688-065-3.
• Clifford A. Pickover (2009). From Archimedes to Hawking: the laws of science and its discoverers. Criticism. ISBN 978-84-9892-003-1.
• John C. Lennox (2011). God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design is it Anyway?. Lion Books. ISBN 9780745955490.