Prize to Stanford black-hole scientist
Aron Wall, a Stanford University physicist who studies black-hole thermodynamics, believes there was a beginning of time, a singular moment of creation like the Big Bang.
It is a much-debated theory that essentially hinges on a question that many a gumchewing 12-year-old has asked of parents: “If the universe had a beginning, what existed before that?”
Wall’s answer to this fundamental question — which also forces one to puzzle over the definition of nothingness — is what has made him popular in the religious community and a bit unusual for a scientist.
“As a Christian, I think God is eternal,” he said. “God is timeless. He’s always there.”
Wall, 34, of Mountain View, was announced Wednesday as a winner of the $100,000 New Horizons in Physics Prize for his studies in black holes, wormholes, faster-than-light travel, the structure of gravity and the secrets of space-time.
He will be given his award along with 20 other winners of the Breakthrough Prize, during a televised ceremony Nov. 4 at NASA’s Ames Research Center, in Mountain View. The prizes, touted as the “Oscars of Science,” honor world-changing discoveries in life sciences, physics and mathematics.
Wall is the only Bay Area resident to win a prize for the coming year.
Xiaowei Zhuang, who got her doctorate degree from UC Berkeley and conducted her postdoctoral research at Stanford, won a $3 million Break-
through award for scientific discovery. Zhuang, now a Harvard University professor and optical imaging investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, won in the life sciences category for discovering hidden structures in cells and developing super-resolution imaging.
The New Horizons award is given for breakthrough research by early-career scientists. Wall’s collaborators in two of his studies, Daniel Harlow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Daniel Jafferis of Harvard University, will share the podium with him.
Wall, who will take a position at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom next spring, insists that his theories about the beginning of time are not influenced by his religion. Instead, he said, 13 years of doctoral and postdoctoral research into quantum gravity and black-hole thermodynamics have bolstered his belief that God must have created the universe.
“I do believe it,” he said, but “as a scientist I want to believe wherever the evidence points.”
Wall has spent a lot of his time trying to show that the rules governing black holes also apply to the rest of the universe, including Earth. He said he and others have shown that black holes obey the laws of thermodynamics, the branch of physical science that deals with the relationship between heat and energy.
His research into black holes has led him into realms of astrophysics that very few people understand. It includes the areas of quantum gravity, string theory and the holographic principle, which, Wall said, postulates in its bare essence that everything, including matter and volume, is reflected or encoded in its surroundings.
He and Jafferis “discovered the first traversable wormhole,” he said, referring to a passageway through space-time that could theoretically be used as a shortcut during a long journey across the universe. He acknowledged there is a lot that is unknown about such phenomena, but he said he is determined to find out how space-time works.
As for his feeling about God: “I look at the world, and I see that it is wonderfully described by mathematics,” said Wall, who regularly posts blogs about physics and theology. “If math describes the world so well, then there are two conclusions: Either the ultimate reality is like an equation or the ultimate reality is like a mathematician.”
One could hardly find a scientist more qualified than Wall to determine whether a divine mathematician did, in fact, create the universe in the image of an equation.