After exactly 300 years of the death of Galileo (who was an immensely famous scientist in the human history), Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford. In his early childhood, Hawking and his family resided in Oxford but fearing the blitz of the World War II, they moved to London. Stephen Hawking’s turned out to be an extremely genius student and mathematics is considered as his first love as he was obsessed with it.
No doubt, he absolutely different from the other students and had less friends but it was his math teacher that gave him special attention knowing his extraordinary capabilities and inspired him to passionately learn and practice higher mathematics. This was the very beginning of the unbelievable journey he had to cover throughout his life.
He faced criticism for not being physically active like the other kids but at the same time the ones who were criticizing him knew that there was something really incredible about him and that he had this amazing talent of thinking outside the box.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Stephen Hawking
So, let’s discuss a few of his remarkable theories and discoveries that made him one of the most renowned scientists who have ever lived on the face of this planet. These discoveries mostly about space and time, revealing some of the deepest secrets about the stars that we see every time in the night sky.
A Universe That Knows No Boundaries
Not only that he proposed his understandings to the world but also proved it with mathematical and physics models and it is one of his discoveries that the universe does not has any spacetime boundaries and that it is boundlessly expanding every second even when you are reading this article. Here’s how he explains it in his words:
“The Big Bang theory says that the universe of matter and energy began at a single point, which reached a critical mass, then exploded outward. The universe continues to expand. In a closed universe theory, at some point, the universe is going to ‘hit the wall,’ when enough energy has been expended from the original big bang, then begin to shrink again. In an open universe theory, the universe will just continue to expand indefinitely as the force of gravity becomes weaker and weaker as objects in space spread further apart.”
According to his proposed concept, there was nothing but hollowness and darkness before the big band. No space and no time but only emptiness. However, it was that some force triggered the big bang and the universe came into being. It is the main reason that the phenomenon of universe worked beyond spacetime boundaries and that these kinds of boundaries are absolutely artificial which means manmade with no natural origin or existence.
In-depth Theories About Black holes
Black holes, are the kind of things that we think only exist in Sci-fi movies like ‘Star Trek’. However, these are the giant and extremely strange celestial objects that are out there lurking in the darkness with extremely powerful gravitational pull that even light can’t escape them.
However, there’s a lot we still haven’t learned about this incredibly scary celestial phenomenon, but it has to be admitted that it would be even more mysterious and unknown if Stephen Hawking wasn’t as curious as he was about unfolding the mysteries of the space. It was this curiosity that kept him fantasizing about the black holes and he didn’t stop working on these incredible discoveries until the last breath his life and unveiled some of the darkest and most mysterious secrets about the universe.
‘If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.’ – Stephen Hawking
Blackhole radiation or more commonly known as Hawking Radiation is yet another mind-boggling discovery made by Stephen Hawking that left the world in awe. It was another time that with his intelligence and visionary approach, Hawking shocked every scientist working in the field of physics around the world by proposing a theory that black holes in fact are thermally active and it is this thing that let them create and emit sub-atomic particles.
However, this phenomenon was later on known as Hawking radiation. However, it is this process that continues until all of the energy has been exhausted and the black hole itself has been evaporated completely until they exhaust their energy and evaporate completely. (inclusion of a fact = if talked in numbers than for a black hole similar to the size of the sun it would take about ~10^67 years to evaporate, it’s like forever but still it is not.
Stephen Hawking and Extraterrestrial Life
Hawking received a lot of admiration and love from the sci-fi fans and especially from the people who strongly believe in the existence of alien life because he at many occasions and through his work had expressed that he too believed in the existence of life other than other. However, what he was afraid of is that if intelligent alien beings ever visited this planet, they might not come in as friends but as enemies and that they could destroy humanity (though, it is only what he believed)
Hinting that such kind of occurrence might not be favorable for earthlings, he at another occasion said, “If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans.”
