Author: Emily Conover / Source: Science News for Students
Physicist Stephen Hawking was one of few scientists to achieve nearly rock-star status. Some scientists considered him a black-hole whisperer for his efforts to divine the secrets of the most mysterious objects of the cosmos. And the public revered him, even if most people couldn’t quite comprehend the physics that kept this scientist busy throughout the decades.
But that remarkable career ended today. The 76-year-old physicist died in Cambridge, England.In one of his best-known discoveries, Hawking determined that black holes are not truly black. Instead, they emit a faint haze of particles. Those particles came to be known as Hawking radiation. This discovery arose at the boundary of gravity and quantum mechanics. And it had remarkable impacts. It suggested that black holes do not live forever. Eventually they must blink out of existence.
But that claim also led to a puzzle known as the “black hole information paradox.” It essentially holds that when a black hole disappears, all of the information that had fallen into it could be lost. And that should not be. As Science News writer Andrew Grant explained in a May 31, 2015 story: Losing that information “violates a central tenet of quantum mechanics: Information cannot be destroyed. Physicists could accept that all the properties of all the particles within a black hole were locked up, forever inaccessible to those outside a black hole . . ….
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