Stephen Hawking: His most important discoveries for science

Stephen Hawking It was more than just a scientist. It was an icon. It was not because of his contributions to the understanding of the universe that, despite their importance, that he became the most famous scientist of his generation. It was also for his work spreading cosmology, which made him the author of Science Bestseller in the world. Above all because of the way he decided to live his life to the fullest despite his neurodegenerative disease that robbed him first of the ability to walk and then the ability to speak, but never thinking, of admiring the greatness of the universe. And angry at injustice on the ground.

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In a world filled with adversity, Hawking was a benchmark: an example to overcome that, despite his harrowing predictions about the future of humanity, conveys a message of hope. Three years after his death, we propose to review his major contributions to the scientific community that make him one of the greatest references of knowledge in history.

black holes

Hawking has devoted his entire life to researching the laws that govern the universe. Many of his works revolve around black holes, so don’t be surprised to see them also appear in the following points.

A black hole is a region of space that has such a large amount of concentrated mass that there is no possibility that some objects close to their gravity will escape. The idea of ​​black holes predates the Hawking period. In fact, the first concepts date back to the 18th century, but it was Einstein’s theory of general relativity, published in 1915, that caused these spatial regions to be taken seriously.

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In the 1970s, Hawking took Einstein’s studies as a basis for achieving a description of the evolution of black holes from quantum physics. “I think my greatest achievement is that black holes are not completely black,” the physicist told the BBC.

He continued, “The quantum effects make them glow like hot objects with a lower temperature the larger the black hole is. This result was completely unexpected and showed that there is a deep relationship between gravity and thermodynamics.”

Hawking radiation

According to Hawking, the effects of quantum physics cause black holes to glow like hot objects, thus losing some of their darkness. In 1976, after the statements of quantum physics, he concluded in His “theory of radiation” that black holes are capable of emitting energy, losing matter, and even disappearing.

So when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) opened on the outskirts of Geneva in 2008, there was great expectation that a particle accelerator could create microscopic black holes and thus test Hawking’s ideas.

Confirm the big bang

Hawking’s work on black holes helped prove the idea of ​​a big explosion at the start of everything. Although it was developed in the 1940’s, The Big Bang theory is not accepted by all cosmologists.

However, in collaboration with the British mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking realized that black holes look like the Big Bang in the opposite direction. So, according to the physicist, the mathematics he used to describe the black holes mentioned above also served to describe the Big Bang.

Putting all of these concepts together, one of Hawking’s most daring assertions was to take into account that Einstein’s general theory of relativity indicates that space and time both have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.

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Theory of everything

Perhaps it was his “theory of everything,” suggesting that the universe evolves according to well-defined laws, that attracted the most attention. “This set of laws can give us answers to questions such as what is the origin of the universe.Hawking announced.

He promised: “Where does it go and will it end? And if so, how will it end? If we find answers to these questions, then we will know the mind of God.”

Brief history of time

Despite the complexity of all these concepts, Hawking has gone to great lengths to spread cosmology in terms easy for the general public to understand.. His book “A Brief History of Time”, published in 1988, has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.

However, the physicist was aware that the sales did not directly translate into full readings, and years later he published a shorter, easier-to-understand version.

Hawking’s great talent, which earned him the Nobel Prize for many never brought him in his life, was the combination of different but equally important fields of physics: gravity, cosmology, quantum theory, thermodynamics, information theory.

Lovell Loxley

"Alcohol buff. Troublemaker. Introvert. Student. Social media lover. Web ninja. Bacon fan. Reader."

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