( Read National Geographic’s coverage of the 2012 announcement.) In 2012, scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider made history when they discovered hints of the Higgs boson-the long-sought missing piece of the standard model of particle physics. The $100 Higgs Bosonīlack holes weren’t the only targets of Hawking’s scientific gambles. Hawking later tried to figure out how black holes preserve information, making notable progress in a 2016 study in Physical Review Letters. In 2004, Hawking conceded the bet, buying Preskill a baseball encyclopedia as a prize. Thorne and Hawking bet that black holes do in fact destroy information-seemingly breaking a tenet of quantum mechanics. In 1997, the trio wagered over whether a black hole destroys the information encoded in the objects it gravitationally devours. Years later, Hawking entered another black hole-related bet with Thorne and Caltech theoretical physicist John Preskill. ( Meet the scientists trying to take the world’s first picture of a black hole.) What’s more, the discovery of gravitational waves in 2016 all but confirmed black holes’ existence. Nowadays, the object is widely accepted to be a black hole. “But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would win me four years of the magazine Private Eye.” I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist,” Hawking wrote in his 1988 book A Brief History of Time. “This was a form of insurance policy for me. But when push came to shove, Hawking bet against Cygnus X-1. On December 10, 1974, Hawking made a bet with Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne over whether Cygnus X-1, a massive x-ray source in our galaxy, was a black hole. But the mischievous cosmologist had a long history of high-profile scientific wagers- many of which he has lost. To those familiar with Hawking’s work, which focused on the mysteries of black holes, it may be surprising that Hawking once bet against their existence. Here, we revisit more of the most famous wagers and provocative statements that Hawking made during his more than 40 years of public life. That bombshell, which inspired a whole new way of looking at black holes through a quantum lens, would certainly not be the last time Hawking made shocking pronouncements about the nature of the cosmos.įor his final paper, submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics just 10 days before his death and published this week, Hawking and colleague Thomas Hertog at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium propose a new theory about what happened in the aftermath of the big bang, and what that means for the existence of multiple universes existing alongside our own. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking, who died in March at age 76, turned the physics world upside down when he announced that black holes aren’t so black after all, and that some light can in fact escape the singularity’s edge, called the event horizon. This article was originally published on March 14.
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