Showing posts with label #singularity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #singularity. Show all posts

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Stephen Hawking


Stephen Hawking



In the early morning of March 14, 2018, exactly 139 years after Albert Einstein’s birth, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. That he lived to such an age, and that he accomplished so much in his time, is a remarkable achievement.
In 1963, Hawking, while a graduate student at Oxford, was diagnosed with a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, which eventually robbed him of all motor functions, including the ability to use his voice. The following year, he became engaged to Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister. Hawking later said that the engagement gave him "something to live for,” since the doctors’ predictions of a very short and unproductive life induced a deep depression. The two married on the 14th July 1965, determined to face all obstacles in their way.
Hawking is most famous for his work regarding black holes, celestial objects so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape their clutches. Based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, Hawking, along with Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Roger Penrose and others, advanced our knowledge of the behavior of the Universe.
Their work suggested that, upon the collapse of a massive star, when it runs out of its own internal nuclear fuel, it undergoes a sudden shrinkage under the pull of its own gravity.  They predicted that the outcome of this collapse, as implied by Einstein’s theory of gravity, to be a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, ordinarily not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical world. A massive star, millions of miles across, would collapse to the size of the dot in the letter ‘i.’
Einstein himself strongly opposed such an idea and conclusion, and for a long time, not much progress occurred in this field. It took the genius of Stephen Hawking, among others, to find that Einstein was in error, and that star collapse and singularity do happen. Thus, in the later 1960s and early 1970s, the study of quantum theory and gravity was revived.
Hawking was a regular visitor to Canada. The physicist permitted The Stephen Hawking Centre in Waterloo, Ontario, to bear his name.
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”


Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," (www.yogazapper.com) published by Books we Love (www.bookswelove.com)

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