Stephen Hawking -

He was an exuberant media star, prey to a degenerative neuromuscular disease, caused by the mutation of the C9ORF72 gene, which began to generate a protein that destroys neurons in the brain. [1] Stephen Hawking seems to have inherited from Einstein the aura of fame and the reputation of genius. The man is celebrated perhaps, according to some scientists, disproportionately.

He is attractive not only for the intellectual progress he has made, but for having made it without the least cooperation of his body, a framework so weak that Hawking might seem like a unique form of disembodied intelligence. However, the image does not fit the man, whose magnetism derives in part from his brilliance, his courage and his vulnerability; and partly from his quick wit, his weakness for Marilyn Monroe posters, and his annoying humanity.

Biographical synthesis

He was born on 8 of January of 1942 , the tercentenary of the death of Galileo (figure he often quotes) in Oxford , England . His parents’ home was in North London , but during World War II , Oxford was considered a safer place to have children. The father, who spent much of his time in Africa , was a medical investigator and his mother worked as a tax inspector and sometimes in a secretarial position.

When he was eight years old, his family moved to St. Albans , a town about 20 kilometers north of London . As a child Stephen was a wimpy student who amused himself by solving problems or inventing new games. He owned a chemistry lab when he was only 10 years old. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St. Albans School and then to University College, Oxford, his father’s former college. Stephen wanted to study mathematics , although his father would have preferred medicine, Hawking rejected biology and at fourteen he was determined to dedicate himself to mathematics and physics.Mathematics was not available at University College, so he pursues Physicsinstead. After three years and a little too much work, he was awarded a first grade honors class in Natural Sciences .

Popular with students and reputed to be smart enough not to study, he played bridge in the evenings and during the day he was helmsman for rowing buddies; in a photo taken in 1961, he is sitting on the prow of a boat, elegant in a white suit and straw hat, alongside a row of eight older men in striped shirts. “Steve and I had to be on the river every morning, six days a week,” physicist Gordon Berry later recalled . Something had to lose, and it was specifically the experimental laboratories.
So when Hawking took his final pre-bachelor’s exams, after several years of loafing around in class, his grades were on the border between A and A. Admission to Cambridge , his chosen school, required an A. Summoned before the examiners, he explained the situation frankly. “If I get an A, I’ll go to Cambridge,” he told them. If I get remarkable I will stay in Oxford . So I trust you will give me the A. ” And they gave it to him.

Appearance of the disease

Stephen then went to Cambrigde to do research in Cosmology , as there is no work in that area at Oxford at the moment. Upon arrival, he realized that there his intelligence did not stand out since that was where all the scientific celebrities had studied and studied. The cosmologist with whom he wanted to carry out his research rejected him, excluding him from his research group. His supervisor was Denis Sciama , although he was hoping to get Fred Hoyle, who was working at Cambridge.

At Cambridge his occasional clumsiness and a tendency to mis-articulate words, which had already appeared at Oxford, worsened. He found it difficult to tie his shoes. The father became aware of these problems during a Christmas vacation. Hawking, who was not yet 21, went to a specialist and a few weeks later was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease . It is a degenerative disease that causes muscles – but not intelligence – to atrophy. The disease, which generally affects the elderly, progressed rapidly at first. Having given him two years to live, Hawking plunged into depression and told an interviewer:

«I had the feeling of being something like a tragic character. I started listening to Wagner. “
Two years later things began to improve. He married Jane Wilde , a high school student he had met before his diagnosis, and began to apply himself to his business.

Doctoral thesis

His thesis tutor, Dennis Sciama , recommended that Hawking meet the mathematician Roger Penrose , who was then studying what happens when a star runs out of fuel and collapses. Penrose showed that, as the universe governed by Einstein’s theory of general relativity expands , once a star collapses beyond a certain point, it inevitably has to become a singularity, the hypothetical point inside the stars. black holes where matter is compressed to infinite density and where space, time and the laws of physics cease to operate.
Spurred on by this idea, Hawking launched into the investigation of completely collapsed stars and found his life’s work. As writer Dennis Overbye has observed , “It was hard not to think of Hawking as his own metaphor.”

Hawking regained his confidence and began to carry out his doctoral thesis, he begins to investigate black holes associating the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics , although he was not the first to be interested in black holes or cosmology . He was preceded by some scientists such as John Michell , Karl Scharzschild , Friedman , Hubble , Landau , Oppenheirmer .

However, some scientists oppose these theories about holes, and supported the theory of Hoyle, the cosmologist who excluded Hawking from his research group. There was talk of a constant space, without beginning or end. Hawking ridiculed Hoyle at a conference by publicly telling him that his calculations were wrong.

Starting with the ideas of Roger Penrose’s singularity theory, Hawking develops the idea of the Big Bang . He explains the origin of the universe as the reversal of an all-encompassing black hole. Hawking’s fame begins to grow in concrete circles thanks to these ideas.

A Princeton researcher , Jacob Bekenstein , picked up the idea. Bekenstein saw a parallel between black holes and the idea of entropy, the measure of random chaos within a system. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the amount of disorder in a closed system necessarily increases with time; entropy, like black holes, always grows. Since every system has entropy, each time a black hole swallows another piece of matter its entropy must increase at the same time as its event horizon. The size of the black hole and its amount of entropy could be equivalent.

Hawking rejected the analogy. His objection was that in any system with a certain amount of disorder, or entropy, there would also have to be a temperature, and everything that has a temperature, no matter how low, emits radiation. “But by definition black holes are objects that aren’t supposed to emit anything,” he wrote. Hence, he decided, the comparison must be wrong. Besides, Bekenstein irritated him.

Two Soviet physicists convinced Hawking to consider the possibility that black holes could still emit particles. When Hawking repeated the calculations he found, “to my surprise and annoyance, that even non-rotating black holes must, it seems, have to create and emit particles on a regular basis.” At lectures, Hawking projected a slide against the wall that read the simple phrase:

“I was wrong”.
He reached this conclusion by studying black holes from the perspective of quantum mechanics.and the uncertainty principle, for which space is never entirely empty. Rather, it is populated by roaming pairs of “virtual” particles – twins of matter and antimatter – that oscillate between existence and annihilation, all in a fraction of a fraction of a nanosecond, too fast to be observed. Hawking proposed that if such pairs appeared near the event horizon, the antimatter particle could be absorbed by the black hole, while the other, very little further, could pass past the monster and fall into the everyday universe. The particle appears to be bursting out of the black hole. In which case, in Hawking’s words, “Black holes aren’t that black.”

La radiación del agujero negro no procede en realidad del agujero negro propiamente dicho sino de la capa de espacio que lo rodea. Sin embargo, la llamada radiación de Hawking tiene un peaje en el agujero negro, pues al entrar la partícula arremolinándose hacia la eternidad, como cae el agua por un sumidero, para nunca volver, su compañera viuda, que no puede aniquilarse en ausencia del socio, no tiene más remedio que convertirse en materia.

Which requires energy. That energy has to come from the black hole. But energy, Einstein taught us , is just another form of mass, and vice versa. So when a black hole gives the virtual particle a pinch of energy, it also loses a miniscule amount of mass, which supposedly cannot. The black hole shrinks a bit and radiates faster.

Ultimately, black holes evaporate in a powerful explosion equivalent to a billion one-megaton hydrogen bombs. This will not happen anytime soon; the typical black hole will take about 1067 years to fade.

His health begins to deteriorate, which forces him to develop many of his ideas and perform many of his calculations mentally, thus acquiring great intellectual development. A scientist named Wheeler came up with a theory about what supposedly happens inside a black hole, but he couldn’t explain it. However, Hawking, through the theory of relativity, manages to explain Wheeler’s theories.

Thanks to his demonstration of Wheeler’s theory, he was invited to spend a year in California at a scientific institution. While Hawking’s health was deteriorating. His speech began to drop out and he needed the continuous help of a wheelchair.

At age 32, he was named one of the youngest members of the Royal Society .

Throughout it all, Hawking has continued his work despite devastating physical decline. In 1969 , two years after the birth of his first child, he could no longer manage with a cane and was forced to use a wheelchair. In the end, he has come to depend on the constant care of a nurse and graduate students who can interpret all his hesitant babbling.

After obtaining his Ph.D. he became the first research fellow and later a faculty member at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973 , Stephen entered the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1979 , and held the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics until 2009, since in his time Isaac Newton, stamped his signature by last time. His speech was almost incomprehensible; then, during an emergency tracheostomy in 1985, he completely lost the ability to speak. It was returned to him with a computerized speech synthesizer that he carries in his wheelchair.

The Chair was founded in 1663 with the money remaining at the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas, who had been a member of Parliament for the University. It was held first by Isaac Barrow, and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton. He is currently the Research Director of the Center for Theoretical Cosmology, at DAMTP in Cambridge.

Contributions

He has made 1974 contributions to the concept of Black Holes .

He concluded that black holes are not completely black; shows that they can lose energy and matter in the form of elementary particles, and that this process accelerates until it becomes explosive.

Relationship with scientific discoveries

1960s Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanical Theory
1783 John Michel deduced from observing the sky, the existence of stars large and dense enough to prevent light from emanating from their surface. He also made predictions of interstellar distances and the nature of double stars.
1916 Karl Schawarzschild demonstrated from the theory of relativity that when a star collapses to a certain radius, the effect of the force of gravity increases to the point that not even light can escape the gravitational field of the star.
1917 Alexander Friedman proved that the idea of a static universe was wrong, and that it is filled with a uniformly fine cloud of matter. It showed that the universe is expanding.
1928 Tested the expansion of the universe through observation of the planets. The speed of the galaxies when moving away was greater the farther away they were.
1933 Lev Landau published an article in which he speculated on the possibility that the center of a star was occupied by another star composed of neutrons. The heat given off by the stars would be generated by the absorption of gas from the inner star.
1933 Robert Oppenheimer and his assistant Hartland Snyder deduced that when a star leaks fuel, it implodes under its own force. By contracting to its critical radius, nothing escapes the surface. The star isolates itself creating the “one-way event horizon.”
Decade of the 30 Wheeler baptized the phenomenon studied with the name of “black hole”. He described what was happening inside the black hole as the union of relativity with quantum physics.
Early 1970s Soviet scientists declare that the conjectures about black holes are wrong.
1950s Hoyle proposes a theory contrary to black holes according to which the universe is constant, and has neither beginning nor end. Stars and galaxies continually rose and fell from space.
Roger Penrose made the Singularity Theory according to which a star would implode to its event horizon, where it would become a black hole. He thought that after the implosion, the star would continue to compress with such intensity that it would defy the laws of physics to the point of having mass, but no dimension.
1966 From the ideas of Penrose, Hawking develops a theory about the origin of the universe, saying that this is the reversal of an all-encompassing black hole. He applied the theory of relativity both ways. He called the origin of matter the Big Bang. If the universe contracts again it would therefore form the Big Crunch.
1930s Wheeler performs the “hairless non-existence theorem” where he says that only three parameters are conserved in a black hole: mass, angular motion, and electric charge.
1974 Hawkin proves the “theorem of the non-existence of hair” thanks to the theory of relativity.
1974 Hawking reasons a theory according to which the surface area of a black hole never decreases. Relate black holes with the second law of thermodynamics, according to which the entropy within an isolated system, such as black holes, will always be equal or greater.
1927 Wrener Heisenberg discovers the uncertainty principle that establishes that it is impossible to determine the position of the electron. The methods we use to calculate it will vary, even if the result is minimally.
1974 From the uncertainty principle Hawking deduces that black holes emit heat. If the black hole is empty, its measurement should be zero, an exact measurement. However, it is not. So he thought that black holes contained invisible particles that moved slightly continuously. This move makes the value inaccurate. The particles emit radiation, causing the hole to emit heat.
1979 Hawking speaks of the theory of the Great Unification that offers a description of all his ideas and that looks for the final explanation that solves all the unknowns.
? Superstring Theory according to which the fundamental objects that make up the universe are string-like single-dimensional objects.
seventeenth century Newton discovers the force of gravity.
1920s Maxwell combines the quantum theory of gravity and electromagnetism to give rise to quantum electronics.
1960 The weak nuclear force and the electromagnetic force are related through a mathematical equation. It predicted the existence of three unknown subnuclear particles.
1983 The three subatomic particles are discovered in an accelerator.
The 1980s Gell-Mann discovers the existence of other more elementary particles that make up the elementary particles until then (proton, neutron, electron) called quarks.
1980s Quantum chronodynamics explains the interaction of quarks.
1980s Combining chronodynamics, electromagnetic forces, and weak nuclear forces, they obtain the Grand Unification theory.
Decade of the 80 The theory of the Great Unification has a disadvantage since they exclude the force of gravity. Hawking tries to fix it.

Publications

His numerous publications include “The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with GFR Ellis,” General Relativity: Einstein’s Centennial Review, with W Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity “, with W Israel. Stephen Hawking has published three books Of disclosure.

Most outstanding books and works

In addition to being a Physicist, he was an excellent English scientific popularizer, one of the most recognized scientists today.

He developed an intense activity as a theorist and popularizer despite amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that was diagnosed in 1963. In his career, work on relativity, quantum theory and black holes, as well as on topology and cosmology, should be highlighted.

As a popularizer, he published several books that had great success around the world, highlighting titles such as A Brief History of Time , Black Holes and Small Universes and other essays , The Theory of Everything or The Cosmic Treasure , the latter dedicated to the smallest and written in collaboration with his daughter Lucy.

2010 . The great design.
2008 . The secret key of the universe.
2008 The Secret Key to the Universe.
2007 . The great illusion. The great works of Albert Einstein.
2007 (2009). The theory of everything. The origin and destiny of the universe.
2006 . God created the numbers. The mathematical discoveries that changed history.
2005 . Very brief history of time.
2003 . On the shoulders of giants. The great works of Physics and Astronomy.
2002 . The future space-time.

The universe in a nutshell.
1996 . The nature of space and time.
1993 . Black holes and small universes.
Quantum and cosmological issues.
1988 . History of time. From the Big Bang to black holes.

Hawking quotes

“The best proof that navigation in time is not possible is the fact that they have not been invaded by masses of tourists from the future.”
“God doesn’t just play dice. Sometimes he also rolls the dice where they cannot be seen. “
“The danger is that our power to harm the environment, or others, increases faster than our wisdom in using that power.”
“Many Nobel Prizes have been awarded for showing that the Universe is not as simple as we might have thought.”

Anecdotes

It was born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo. Newton was also born around the same time and in the same year as Galileo’s death.
In 1916, two of the great thinkers of the time took place on the same Russian front. Karl Schwarzschild who demonstrated the idea from which the existence of black holes started, and one of the great philosophers of the 20th century , Ludwig Wittgenstein.
The sun would turn into a black hole when its radius went from the 700,000 kilometers that it currently measures to a length of 3 kilometers.
Oppenheimer and Snyder publish their research in Physical Review on September 1, the same day that World War II begins with Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
In the same issue of the journal Physical Review Niels Bohr and John Wheeler publish the way to obtain nuclear fusion, which will be the mechanism for obtaining the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer himself would later participate in the project that would make the atomic bomb.
He contradicts the calculations of the cosmologist Hoyle in a lecture given by him, thus making a revenge against Hoyle’s previous rejection of Hawking.
In 1974 Hawking was invited to spend a year at Caltech, a scientific institution where numerous Nobel laureates worked.
On his trip to California , Hawking acquires the first poster in his collection about Marilyn Monroe.
At a conference, an accompanying friend made a joke about his illness: “As evidenced by the fact that your young son, Timothy, is less than half the age of the illness, it is clear that not everything in Stephen is paralyzed. . “
He last signed on being appointed Professor of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, as his illness subsequently prevents him from doing so.
He uses his growing fame in favor of the disabled. For this reason, the Royal Association in favor of the Rehabilitation of the Disabled awarded him the award for “Man of the year.”
He thought that by finding the solutions to the equations that physics presents us, the mind of God will be known. Earlier Pythagoras was the first to formulate a hypothesis that the mind of God had to agree with mathematics. They related science to all the answers, even to the existence of God.
Steven Spielberg is interested in producing a film about the book written by Hawking. On his visit to Hollywood, he advises that the title of the film be “Back to the Future.”

Other objectives

He wants to become an astronaut , which will be difficult due to his health, as well as working in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence among other projects.