Why Stephen Hawking ‘Matters’?

A tribute to Stephen Hawking.

He was a cartoon character, a scientist, and a motivational speaker. The movie ‘Theory of Everything” was based on his life. He started the quest for knowledge when he was able to walk and talk, but the disease named as “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” paralyzed him. He was unable to speak, walk or even get up from his wheelchair. Thanks to technology, that he was able to talk. It was an Apple II computer which ran a piece of software called Equaliser, allowing Hawking to use a hand clicker to single out words and commands and speak them aloud through a linked Speech Plus synthesizer.His scientific life began since his school days, but his fascination towards the black hole in undergraduate led him to discover radiation called Hawking’s radiation on late phase.

Every matter is made up of atoms, which consists of electron, proton, and neutron. This is just basic stuff, in reality, further electron, proton, and neutron are made up of other particles which fit into the table of Standard Model of Particle Physics. The standard model gives a view that for each particle you have an antiparticle such that electron has positron, the proton has antiproton and neutron has an antineutron. Although, Stephen Hawking didn’t get Nobel prize he was able to prove that, nearby the black hole, one of the particle-antiparticle pairs goes inside the black hole and other goes outside as radiation. The radiation moving out is Hawking’s radiation.

One of the other theorem given by him is about Singularity. He argued that universe was created from zero. It is a point from which the creation began. Actually, inside some black holes, the compression of particles is so high that it turns to a point like a singularity from which a big bang manifests. Not only these two but he has many more in his credits.

Let’s remember him not as a cartoon character from Simpsons, but as one of the great scientists of this era.