Stephen Hawking is the greatest cosmologist and theoretical physicist of our time. Born in 1942, the future scientist at the age of 20 began to experience health problems. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis greatly impeded studies at the Department of Theoretical Physics at Oxford, but did not prevent Stephen from leading a very active, eventful lifestyle. He married in 1965, became a member of the Royal Society of London in 1974. By this time, he had already had a daughter and two sons. In 1985, the scientist stopped talking. Today, only one facial muscle on the cheek has retained mobility in his body. It seemed that a completely motionless and dumb man was sentenced. However, in 1995 he marries again, and in 2007 ... flies in zero gravity.
On Earth, there is no person deprived of mobility who would live a life so full, useful and interesting.
But that is not all. Hawking's greatest development was the theory of Black Holes. The “Hawking Theory,” as it is now called, has fundamentally changed the long-standing ideas of scientists about the Black Holes of the Universe.
At the beginning of work on the theory, the scientist, like many of his colleagues, argued that everything that gets into them is forever destroyed in Black Holes . This information paradox haunted the military and scientists around the world. It was believed that no properties of these space objects, with the exception of mass, could be established.
Having studied Black Holes in 1975, Hawking established that they constantly emit a stream of photons and some other elementary particles into space. However, even the scientist himself was sure that the “Hawking radiation” was random, unpredictable. The scientist at first thought that this radiation does not carry any information.
However, the ability of a brilliant mind is the ability to constantly doubt. Hawking continued his research and found that the Black Hole evaporation (i.e., Hawking radiation) is quantum in nature. This allowed him to conclude that the information that fell into the Black Hole does not collapse, but changes. The theory that the state of a hole is constant is true if we consider it from the point of view of non-quantum physics.
Given quantum theory, the vacuum is filled with "virtual" particles that emit different physical fields. The strength of the radiation is constantly changing. When it becomes very strong, particle-antiparticle pairs can be born directly from the vacuum at the event horizon (border) of the Black hole. If the total energy of one particle turns out to be positive, and the second - negative, if at the same time the particles fall into the Black Hole, then they begin to behave differently. The negative antiparticle begins to decrease the rest energy of the Black hole, and the positive particle tends to infinity.
From the side, this process looks like evaporation coming from the Black Hole. It is this evaporation that is called "Hawking radiation." The scientist found that this “evaporation” of distorted information has its own thermal spectrum, visible by instruments, and a certain temperature.
The radiation of Hawking, according to the scientist himself, indicates that not all information is lost and disappears forever in the Black Hole. He is confident that quantum physics proves the impossibility of the complete destruction or loss of information. And this means that such information, albeit in a modified form, contains Hawking radiation.
If the scientist is right, then the past and future of Black Holes can be explored in the same way as the history of other planets.
Unfortunately, this disproves the idea of the possibility of traveling through time or to other universes using Black Holes. The presence of Hawking radiation proves that any object falling into a hole will return to our Universe in the form of altered information.
Not all scientists share the beliefs of the British physicist. However, they also do not dare to challenge them. Today, the whole world is waiting for Hawking's new publications, in which he promised to thoroughly and conclusively confirm the objectivity of his theory, which turned the scientific world upside down.
Moreover, scientists were able to obtain Hawking radiation in the laboratory. This happened in 2010.