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scientificamerican.com

Scientists Mourn Stephen Hawking's

Death
Davide Castelvecchi,Nature
5-6 minutos

Stephen Hawking, one of the most influential physicists of the

twentieth century and perhaps the most celebrated icon of
contemporary science, has died at the age of 76.

The University of Cambridge confirmed that the physicist died in the

early hours of 14 March at his home in Cambridge, England.

Since his early twenties, Hawking had lived with amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS), a disease in which motor neurons die, leaving the
brain incapable of controlling muscles. Hawking’s health had been
reportedly deteriorating; just over a year ago, he was hospitalized
during a trip to Rome.

His death was marked by statements from scientists around the

world. Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, the director of the
Hayden Planetarium in New York City, wrote on Twitter: "His
passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake. But it's not
empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric
of spacetime that defies measure."

One of Hawking’s former students at Cambridge, theoretical

physicist Raphael Bousso, told Nature that his teacher was a

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brilliant physicist who also excelled at communicating science to

the public. “These are two distinct skills. Stephen excelled at both.”

Bousso, now at the University of California at Berkeley, recalls how

he had to learn to shake off his awe and relax around Hawking.
“Stephen was a joyful and lighthearted person, not to be burdened
by excessively respectful and convoluted interactions,” he says.

The British physicist was born in Oxford in 1942. He was diagnosed

with ALS when he was 21, while a doctoral student in cosmology at
the University of Cambridge. Hawking first realized that something
was wrong when he went ice skating with his mother one day, he
recalled in a speech on his 75th birthday celebration last year. “I fell
over and had great difficulty getting up,” he told the audience. “At
first I became depressed. I seemed to be getting worse very
rapidly.”

Although physicians initially gave him just a few years to live, his
disease advanced more slowly than expected. He went on to have
an active career for decades, both as a theoretical physicist and as
a popularizer of science. Still, Hawking progressively lost use of
most of his muscles, and for the last three decades of his life was
communicating almost exclusively through a voice synthesizer.

Over the years, Hawking became one of the most recognized

names in contemporary science. His books, particularly A Brief
History of Time, became blockbuster successes. He relished
making cameo apparitions on television shows such as Star Trek:
The Next Generation, The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory.

But scientifically, his name is most closely associated with the

physics of black holes, which he began to study when they were
still considered mere mathematical curiosities in Albert Einstein’s

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general theory of relativity. In the early 1970s, he began to

investigate what quantum physics could reveal about the event
horizon, a black hole’s surface of no return. Hawking shocked the
physics world when he calculated that this surface should slowly
emit radiation (soon to become known as Hawking radiation). Black
holes were not truly black.

This emission, he reasoned, should ultimately lead the black hole to

shrink and disappear. Even more shocking to researchers was the
fact that Hawking radiation should erase information from the
Universe, in apparent contradiction to some of the basic tenets of
quantum theory, as Hawking pointed out in 1976.

Perhaps because most of his work was of speculative nature and

difficult to test experimentally, Hawking was never awarded a Nobel
Prize. In 2016 some wondered whether he finally might get one,
when Jeff Steinhauer, a physicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology in Haifa, announced that he had found convincing
evidence of Hawking radiation — not in an actual black hole, but in
a laboratory analogue made of extremely cold atoms. However,
some experts still consider those results inconclusive and many say
that their relevance to true black holes is uncertain.

A more direct test of some of Hawking’s findings might yet come

from the study of astrophysical black holes through gravitational
waves, initiated by the US-based Laser Interferometer
Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). Hawking and others have
linked the surface area of a black hole’s event horizon to its
entropy, a measure of disorder. When interviewed by Nature’s news
team in 2016 about LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves
from merging black holes, Hawking said that he hoped that future
detections would be sensitive enough to confirm a prediction he

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had made in the 1970: that the surface area of the post-merger
black hole should be larger than the combined surface area of the
original objects — just as would be expected from entropy, which
can never decrease. “I would like them to test my area theorem,” he
said.

Davide Castelvecchi

Davide Castelvecchi is a senior reporter at Nature in London

covering physics, astronomy, mathematics and computer science.

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