Hawking’s radiation carries on
U.S. Presidnet Donald Trump is the centre of the universe. It’s true. Stephen Hawking said so. So will any living astrophysicist. Toronto is also the centre of the universe. And so are you, wherever you are in space and time. Two years ago, in his six-part PBS series Genius, Hawking used everyday people and simple experiments to explain complex ideas in cosmology and astrophysics, such as where is the centre of the universe.
“The middle of the universe is a matter of perspective,” one of the participants concluded after taking part in Hawking’s exercise. “It’s wherever you’re looking from.”
“Everywhere is the centre of the universe because it all came into existence at the same time and it’s all moving away from everywhere at the same time,” said another. Mind-bending stuff.
That’s the world Hawking lived in until his death last week at age 76.
And he believed anybody could come to a basic understanding of these concepts, without all the fussy math. In his classic A Brief History of Time, the 1988 international bestseller that made him the most famous scientist of his generation, he insisted on using no mathematical formulas whatsoever except for Einstein’s famous E=mc2 from his theory of relativity.
Hawking’s specialty was actually black holes, an astronomical feature Einstein predicted but even his genius couldn’t accept the possibility of such a bizarre feature of the cosmos, a physical place where gravity was so powerful that light, space and time were first warped and then crushed to nothingness beyond the event horizon.
Hawking arrived on the scientific scene in the 1970s, just as astrophysicists were intensely focused on proving whether the Cygnus X-1 anomaly, just over 6,000 light years from Earth or right next door from a galactic perspective, was actually a black hole.
Not an easy thing to do because, as astrophysicist Janna Levin points out in her Black Hole Apocalypse episode of Nova that aired in January on PBS, you’re looking to prove the existence of a black object that emits no light against the black backdrop of space.
What Hawking and his colleagues around the world could observe, however, was how the possible black hole was affecting gases and light from the giant star orbit- ing around it. Hawking famously made a friendly bet with the American physicist Kip Thorne in 1974 that Cygnus X-1 wasn’t a black hole, hoping he was wrong but taking the wager anyhow.
He conceded in 1990.
By then, it was becoming increasingly clear (to astrophysicists) that black holes were far more common in the universe than Einstein ever dreamed.
Even more amazing, Cygnus X-1 would be easily sucked into the supermassive black holes at the heart of quasars and those supermassive black holes are equally tiny next to the supermassive black holes found at the centre of every galaxy in the universe, including the one in the Milky Way, our home galaxy.
As Levin explained on Nova, Einstein’s theory predicted black holes but it would be decades before one was found. No one predicted the existence of supermassive black holes. Astronomers stumbled across their effects and bright minds like Hawking worked backwards with the math to explain the observations.
Hawking never won a Nobel Prize be- cause his contribution to black hole science hasn’t been definitively proven yet. Hawking’s radiation suggests that black holes aren’t completely black because some radiation escapes. Nobel Prizes aren’t awarded for great ideas or brilliant minds, however, but for scientific theories that are proven.
Hawking’s friend that he made the wager with in 1974 did win the Nobel Prize last fall. Kip Thorne and two others won the award for their work on the theory of gravitational waves.
Shortly after the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project came on line in 2015 in Washington state and Louisiana, it detected the faint but clearly observable gravitational waves emitted from two black holes colliding a billion years ago.
In the present day, those interested in a 16-hour road trip can visit LIGO’s Washington facility is in the south-central part of the state. Take Highway 97 all the way from Prince George to Yakima and then turn left towards Kennewick. Tours are available.
It’s scientists like Thorne and Hawking that show how interesting a place the vast universe beyond our small pebble of a planet can be.
We should all care because somehow we’re all smack dab in the middle of it.
But Trump is, too.
(Stephen Hawking) believed anybody could come to a basic understanding of these concepts, without all the fussy math.