The Science that made

Stephen Hawking famous

Posted on November 5, 2014 by shaunmaguire

In anticipation of The Theory of Everything which comes out today, and

in the spirit of continuing with Quantum Frontiers current movie
theme, I wanted to provide an overview of Stephen Hawkings
pathbreaking research. Or at least to the best of my abilitynot every
blogger on this site has won bets against Hawking! In particular, I want
to describe Hawkings work during the late 60s and through the 70s.
His work during the 60s is the backdrop for this movie and his work
during the 70s revolutionized our understanding of black holes.

(Portrait of Stephen Hawking outside the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical
Physics, Cambridge. Credit: Jason Bye)

As additional context, this movie is coming out at a fascinating time, at

a time when Hawkings contributions appear more prescient and
important than ever before. Im alluding to the firewall paradox, which
is the modern reincarnation of the information paradox (which will be
discussed below), and which this blog has discussed multipletimes.
Progress through paradox is an important motto in physics and

Hawking has been at the center of arguably the most

challenging paradox of the past half century. I should also mention that
despite irresponsible journalism in response to Hawkings there are no
black holes comment back in January, that there is extremely solid
evidence that black holes do in fact exist. Hawking was referring to a
technical distinction concerning the horizon/boundary of black holes.
Now lets jump back and imagine that we are all young graduate
students at Cambridge in the early 60s. Our protagonist, a young
Hawking, had recently been diagnosed with ALS, he had recently met
Jane Wilde and he was looking for a thesis topic. This was an exciting
time for Einsteins Theory of General Relativity (GR). The gravitational
redshifthad recently been confirmed by Pound and Rebka at Harvard,
which put the theory on extremely solid footing. This was the third of
three classical tests of GR. So now that everyone was truly convinced
that GR is correct, it became important to get serious about
investigating its most bizarre predictions. Hawking and Penrose picked
up on this theme most notably.The mathematics of GR allows
for singularities which lead to things like thebig bang and black holes.
This mathematical possibility was known since the works of Friedmann,
Lemaitre and Oppenheimer+Snyder starting all the way back in the
1920s, but these calculations involved unphysical assumptions
usually involving unrealistic symmetries. Hawking and Penrose each
asked (and answered) the questions: how robust and generic are these
mathematical singularities? Will they persist even if we get rid of
assumptions like perfect spherical symmetry of matter? What is their
interpretation in physics?
I know that I have now used the word singularity multiple times
without defining it. However, this is for good reasonits very hard to
assign a precise definition to the term! Some examples of singularities
include regions of infinite curvature or with conical deficits.
Singularity theorems applied to cosmology: Hawkings first major
results, starting with his thesis in 1965, was proving that singularities
on the cosmological scalesuch as the big bangwere indeed generic

phenomena and not just mathematical artifacts. This work was

published immediately after, and it built upon, a seminal paper by
Penrose. Also, I apologize for copping-out again, but its outside the
scope of this post to say more about the big bang, but as a rough
heuristic, imagine that if you run time backwards then you obtain
regions of infinite density. Hawking and Penrose spent the next five or
so years stripping away as many assumptions as they could until they
were left with rather general singularity theorems. Essentially, they
used MATH to say something exceptionally profound about
THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE! Namely that if you start with any
solution to Einsteins equations which is consistent with our observed
universe, and run the solution backwards, then you will obtain
singularities (regions of infinite density at the Big Bang in this case)!
However, I should mention that despite being a revolutionary leap in
our understanding of cosmology, this isnt the end of the story, and
that Hawking has also pioneered an attempt to understand what
happens when you add quantum effects to the mix. This is still
a very active area of research.
Singularity theorems applied to black holes: the first convincing
evidence for the existence of astrophysical black holes didnt come
until 1972 with the discovery of Cygnus X-1, and even this discovery
was wrought with controversy. So imagine yourself as Hawking back in
the late 60s. He and Penrose had this powerful machinery which they
had successfully applied to better understand THE BEGINNING OF THE
UNIVERSE but there was still a question about whether or not black
holes actually existed in nature (not just in mathematical fantasy land.)
In the very late 60s and early 70s, Hawking, Penrose, Carter and
others convincingly argued that black holes should exist. Again, they
used math to say something about how the most bizarre corners of the
universe should behaveand then black holes were discovered
observationally a few years later. Math for the win!
No hair theorem: after convincing himself that black holes
exist Hawking continued his theoretical studies about their strange
properties. In the early 70s, Hawking, Carter, Israel and Robinson

proved a very deep and surprising conjecture of John Wheeler

that black holes have no hair! This name isnt the most descriptive but
its certainly provocative. More specifically they showed that only a
short time after forming, a black hole is completely described by only a
few pieces of data: knowledge of its position, mass, charge, angular
momentum and linear momentum (X, M, Q, J and L). It only takes a
few dozen numbers to describe an exceptionally complicated object.
Contrast this to, for example, 1000 dust particles where you would
need tens of thousands of datum (the position and momentum of each
particle, their charge, their mass, etc.) This is crazy, the number of
degrees of freedom seems to decrease as objects form into black
holes?
Black hole thermodynamics: around the same time, Carter,
Hawking and Bardeen proved a result similar to the second law of
thermodynamics (its debatable how realistic their assumptions are.)
Recall that this is the law where the entropy in a closed system only
increases. Hawking showed that, if only GR is taken into account, then
the area of ablack holes horizon only increases. This includes that if
two black holes with areas

and

merge then the new area

bigger than the sum of the original areas

will be

Combining this with the no hair theorem led to a fascinating

exploration of a connection between thermodynamics and black holes.
Recall that thermodynamics was mainly worked out in the 1800s and it
is very much a classical theoryone that didnt involve either
quantum mechanics or general relativity. The study of thermodynamics
resulted in the thrilling realization that it could be summarized by four
laws. Hawking and friends took the black hole connection seriously and
conjectured that there would also be four laws of black hole mechanics.
In my opinion, the most interesting results came from trying to
understand the entropy of black hole. The entropy is usually the
logarithm of the number of possible states consistent with observed
large scale quantities. Take the ocean for example, the entropy is
humungous. There are an unbelievable number of small changes that
could be made (imagine the number of ways of swapping the location

of a water molecule and a grain of sand) which would be consistent

with its large scale properties like its temperature. However, because
of the no hair theorem, it appears that the entropy of a black hole is
very small? What happens when some matter with a large amount of
entropy falls into a black hole? Does this lead to a violation of the
second law of thermodynamics? No! It leads to a generalization!
Bekenstein, Hawking and others showed that there are two
contributions to the entropy in the universe: the standard 1800s
version of entropy associated to matter configurations, but also
contributions proportional to the area of black hole horizons. When you
add all of these up, a new generalized second law of
thermodynamics emerges. Continuing to take this thermodynamic
argument seriously (dE=TdS specifically), it appeared that black holes
have a temperature!
As a quick aside, a deep and interesting question is what degrees of
freedom contribute to this black hole entropy? In the late
90s Strominger and Vafa made exceptional progress towards
answering this question when he showed that in certain settings, the
number of microstates coming from string theory exactly reproduces
the correct black hole entropy.
Black holes evaporate (Hawking Radiation): again, continuing to
take this thermodynamic connection seriously, if black holes have
a temperature then they should radiate away energy. But what is the
mechanism behind this? This is when Hawking fearlessly embarked on
one of the most heroic calculations of the 20th century in which he
slogged through extremely technical calculations involving quantum
mechanics in a curved space and showed that after superimposing
quantum effects on top of general relativity, there is a mechanism for
particles to escape from a black hole.
This is obviously a hard thing to describe, but for a hack-job analogy,
imagine you have a hot plate in a cool room. Somehow the plate
radiates away its energy until it has the same temperature as the
room. How does it do this? By definition, the reason why a plate is hot,
is because its molecules are jiggling around rapidly. At the boundary of

the plate, sometimes a slow moving air molecule (lower temperature)

gets whacked by a molecule in the plate and leaves with a higher
momentum than it started with, and in return the corresponding
molecule in the plate loses energy. After this happens an enormous
number of times, the temperatures equilibrate. In the context of black
holes, these boundary interactions would never happen without
quantum mechanics. General relativity predicts that anything inside
the event horizon is causally disconnected from anything on the
outside and thats that. However, if you take quantum effects into
account, then for some very technical reasons, energy can be
exchanged at the horizon (interface between the inside and outside
of the black hole.)
Black hole information paradox: but wait, theres more! These
calculations werent done using a completely accurate theory of nature
(we use the phrase quantum gravity as a placeholder for whatever
this theory will one day be.) They were done using some nightmarish
amalgamation of GR and quantum mechanics. Seminal thought
experiments by Hawking led to different predictions depending upon
which theory one trusted more: GR or quantum mechanics. Most
famously, the information paradox considered what would happen if an
encyclopedia were thrown into the black hole. GR predicts that after
the black hole has fully evaporated, such that only empty space is left
behind, that the information contained within this encyclopedia
would be destroyed. (To readers who know quantum mechanics,
replace encylopedia with pure state.) This prediction unacceptably
violates the assumptions of quantum mechanics, which predict that the
information contained within the encyclopedia will never be destroyed.
(Maybe imagine you enclosed the black hole with perfect sensing
technology and measured every photon that came out of the black
hole. In principle, according to quantum mechanics, you should be able
to reconstruct what was initially thrown into the black hole.)
Making all of this more rigorous: Hawking spent most of the rest of
the 70s making all of this more rigorous and stripping away

assumptions. One particularly otherworldly and powerful tool involved

redoing many of these black hole calculations using the euclidean path
integral formalism.
Im certain that I missed some key contributions and collaborators in
this short history, and I sincerely apologize for that. However, I hope
that after reading this you have a deepened appreciation for how
productive Hawking was during this period. He was one of humanitys
earliest pioneers into the uncharted territory that we call quantum
gravity. And he has inspired at least a few generations worth of
theoretical physicists, obviously, including myself.
In addition to reading many of Hawkings original papers, an extremely
fun source for this post is a book which was published after his 60th
birthday conference.