BBC Horizon 2005: 2/7 The Hawking Paradox

Hawking and his fellow physicist embarked on an extraordinary intellectual expedition - to tame the black hole. The period from the early 70s to the early 80s became known as the "Golden Age" of black hole research.

Slowly physicists were coming to understand its nature.

But Hawking realised that there was something missing from the picture that was emerging. All work on black holes to that point used the physics of the large-scale Universe.

The physics of gravity - first developed by Newton and then refined by Einstein's general theory of relativity. Hawking realised that to come to a full understanding of black holes, physicists would also have to use the physics of the small-scale Universe; the physics that had been developed to explain the movements of atoms and sub-atomic particles known as quantum mechanics.

The only problem was that no one had ever combined these two areas of physics before. This didn't deter Hawking. He set about developing a new way to force the physics of quantum mechanics to co-exist with Einstein's relativity within the intense gravity of a black hole.

After months of work, Hawking came up with a remarkable result. His equations were showing him that something was coming out of the black hole.

This was supposed to be impossible - the one thing that everyone thought they knew about black holes was that things went in but nothing, not even light itself, could escape.

The more Hawking checked, the more he was convinced he was right. He could see radiation coming out of the black hole. And it led him to the realisation that this radiation (later called Hawking radiation) would cause the black hole to evaporate and eventually disappear.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• black holes
• universe
• string theory
• physics
• big bang
• astronomy
• Stephen Hawking

[20PhantoM07]

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