The revolutionary science of Hawking

Stephen Hawking once said that “fact is stranger than fiction and nowhere is this more true than in the case of black holes”.

In A Brief History of Time, Hawking described spacetime as a rubber sheet that could be bent by a heavy ball (a star or planet). As the ball became heavier, a bottomless hole, a black hole, would form from which nothing could escape.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity predicted that a black hole could exist as a singularity. Most scientists assumed that such a contraction could not happen in the real universe. But Hawking showed that they could exist mathematically, culminating in the 1970 singularity theorem.

Hawking then turned his attention to the thermodynamics and realised that black holes were not black. Instead they “emitted particles at a steady rate” and ejection which came to be known as “Hawking radiation”.

Hawking’s work was ground-breaking because it combined theories of quantum physics with general relativity for the first time.