Black holes dissolving like aspirin: How Hawking changed physics
In this file photo taken on April 21, 2008, British physicist Stephen Hawking (L) and his daughter Lucy Hawking give a lecture entitled 'Why We Should Go Into Space' during the 50 Years of NASA lecture series at George Washington University in Washington, DC. PHOTO | JIM WATSON | AFP
Black holes, it was thought, were bottomless pits from which matter and energy could never escape.
But Hawking, sometimes described as the most influential theoretical physicist since Einstein, questioned this, saying that black holes were not really black at all and must emit particles.
In so doing, he touched on a persistent headache for physicists: Einstein's theory, which has withstood every experimental test so far, does not explain the behaviour of particles in the subatomic, "quantum" sphere.
PARIS,
When Stephen Hawking postulated in the mid-1970s that black holes leak radiation, slowly dissolving like aspirin in a glass of water, he overturned a core tenet of the Universe.
