
A brief history of Stephen Hawking: A legacy of paradox - DocFeind
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2053929-a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-a-legacy-of-paradox/
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icc97
I don't remember reading this before (in the Penrose obituary), that is that
he discovered Hawking radiation when trying to prove that it didn't exist:

> Bekenstein realised this was key to the entropy problem. Every time a black
> hole swallows matter, its entropy appears to be lost, and at the same time,
> its event horizon grows. So, Bekenstein suggested, what if – to preserve the
> second law – the area of the horizon is itself a measure of entropy?

> Hawking immediately disliked the idea and was angry that his own work had
> been used in support of a concept so flawed. With entropy comes heat, but
> the black hole couldn’t be radiating heat – nothing can escape its pull of
> gravity. During a break from the lectures, Hawking got together with
> colleagues Brandon Carter, who also studied under Sciama, and James Bardeen,
> of the University of Washington, and confronted Bekenstein.

> The disagreement bothered Bekenstein. “These three were senior people. I was
> just out of my PhD. You worry whether you are just stupid and these guys
> know the truth,” he recalls.

> Back in Cambridge, Hawking set out to prove Bekenstein wrong. Instead, he
> discovered the precise form of the mathematical relationship between entropy
> and the black hole’s horizon. Rather than destroying the idea, he had
> confirmed it. It was Hawking’s greatest breakthrough.

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iooi
> Black holes were a subject ripe for investigation in the early 1970s.
> Although Karl Schwarzschild had found such objects lurking in the equations
> of general relativity back in 1915, theoreticians viewed them as mere
> mathematical anomalies and were reluctant to believe they could actually
> exist.

Can someone recommend some books to learn these equations? I'm fascinated by
the fact that an object can be found in an equation before it's observed.

~~~
soVeryTired
> I'm fascinated by the fact that an object can be found in an equation before
> it's observed

The same is true of antimatter. Paul Dirac deduced its existence from the
Dirac equation before it was discovered experimentally.

~~~
spodek
Neutrinos were predicted based on observations of other particles before
observed.

Same with Pluto.

The speed of light being constant isn't a particle but emerged from Maxwell's
equations.

