Singularity Hub
Stephen Hawking: Martin Rees Look Back on Colleague’s Spectacular Success Against all Odds
(Perhaps this article along with the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Helen Keller should be on the recommended reading lists for young students.)
Gizmodo
What you need to Know About Stephen Hawking’s Final Paper
ArXive.org
A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?
Oxford Science Blog - (Example of Current Theoretical Physics)
The other side of the Big Bang
Barak Kol
Head of Hebrew University’s Racah Institute of Physics
It is common knowledge that Prof. Stephen Hawking was one of the greatest scientists of our time, as well as an inspiring instance of human spirit and humor in the face of illness and difficulty. It is perhaps less known that his single most scientific achievement, namely the theoretical discovery of Hawking radiation from black holes was intimately related to the ideas of the late Prof. Jacob Bekenstein from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1972 Bekenstein, then a Ph.D. student at Princeton University, suggested that black holes might have properties of heat (more precisely entropy, known today as Bekenstein-Hawking black hole entropy). This idea was met with disbelief as scientists, including Hawking, thought that black holes absorb everything, yet nothing can escape them, and therefore their temperature would have to be the absolute zero.
Yet in 1974 it was Hawking who discovered theoretically that once the effects of quantum physics are taken into account a weak radiation must escape that black hole. This radiation is known as Hawking radiation and it is accompanied by a temperature of the black hole. In this way it was Hawking who established and confirmed Bekenstein’s earlier ideas and together they form the basis for Black Hole Thermodynamics, which is one of the pillars of contemporary theoretical physics. As this story illustrates, sometimes debate and even controversy, work towards a better and more united scientific understanding.
