The book “From the big bang to black holes” by the English cosmologist born 80 years ago is released on 8 January with the “Corriere”. He made important theoretical discoveries, he was an excellent communicator
In an episode of the saga of Star Trek there is a virtual poker game created from a hologram. Together with the android Data, at the table are seated Newton, Einstein and Stephen Hawking. While the first three are played by actors, Hawking plays himself. Having agreed to appear in a cameo in the famous science fiction series illustrates the personality of the British cosmologist and his determination to “break out of the box” despite the serious degenerative disease he was diagnosed with at the age of 21, a form of lateral sclerosis amyotrophic.
Newton, grumpy and resentful as he was, would never have agreed to appear in person in a film, and perhaps neither would Einstein. But when Hawking made this decision he was no longer just a scientist, he had already become an international star, the “Freddie Mercury of science”, a role he liked and wanted to play also to demonstrate that a person suffering from a devastating debilitating disease could still live a fulfilling life. “Even if you are confined to a wheelchair, you continue to live and fight,” Hawking seemed to mean by his mere presence at conferences and popular science television shows.
Hawking-rockstar is not a risky or disrespectful combination. In 1994, thanks to an Intel microprocessor, his voice appeared in the song Keep Talking by Pink Floyd with phrases intended to underline the evolutionary importance it had for humanity the possibility of expressing oneself in words. Collaboration extended further 20 years later in a piece called Talkin’ Hawkin’ contained in the album The Endless River, in which among other things he states: “Our greatest hopes may come true in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the options are endless ».
For Hawking, the options were truly limitless: not only scientist and professor (for 30 years he was Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, the same chair occupied 310 years earlier by Newton), but great popularizer and writer. His 1988 book From the big bang to black holes, Saturday 8 January on newsstands with the “Corriere” remained for 237 weeks (over four and a half years) in the list of best-selling books of the “Sunday Times”. In the following years he wrote other volumes of extraordinary success, of which at least deserve to be mentioned The theory of everything e The great history of time.
Hawking had the undisputed merit of bringing science, and in particular a difficult branch such as theoretical physics, to the level of the general public. His was a simple but never banal language, captivating but with solid scientific foundations, able to “pass” complicated concepts such as quantum gravity, curved space or the expansion of the universe.
Hawking was the icon of the scientist who does not stay closed in his laboratory or who devotes his entire life to teaching, detached from the world, without anything being known about him apart from scientific publications. Hawking, on the contrary, he is the main exponent of that group of “committed scientists.”Who saw in Einstein the first and most important example. And who, perhaps, found in Giorgio Parisi, the new Nobel Prize in physics, the personality capable of continuing on that path.
In 2007 Hawking also experienced weightlessness in one detail for a few moments free fall parabolic flight with a plane in which astronauts are trained to stay in reduced gravity on the International Space Station. His joy, he being forced into a technological chair, transpires from the shots that were made and which can also be seen on the web. Had he not disappeared in 2018, perhaps today when he would have turned 80 he would have taken off on one of the space tourist flights and we would have seen him floating in the Cosmos. Richard Branson, patron of Virgin Galactic, had already offered him a free pass for a suborbital flight years ago.
However, Hawking’s public dimension risks overshadowing that of a scientist. Hawking occupies a front row seat in the recent history of physics mainly thanks to his studies on the Big Bang and black holes. Born and graduated from Oxford, he completed his studies in Cambridge, where he remained to teach. After the diagnosis of the disease, the doctors gave him two, at most three years to live. In 1985, following severe pneumonia, he underwent a tracheostomy and was no longer able to speak autonomously without a speech synthesizer. His studies together with Roger Penrose, Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020, led to the theory of gravitational singularities, in which the curvature of spacetime tends to infinity, as in the Big Bang and black holes, proving that singularities are a general and not an occasional feature of the theory of relativity.
Subsequent studies led Hawking to formulate two laws bearing his name: the theory of the area of black holes and that of Hawking radiation. The first, theorized in 1971 and verified by observations only on 1 July 2021 thanks to the analysis of gravitational waves, states that the area of the event horizon of a black hole (the surface beyond which we cannot see anything because the gravity is so high that not even light can escape) it never decreases. The second is instead the demonstration that even black holes are described by the laws of thermodynamics and gradually lose mass through Hawking radiation, until they completely “evaporate” in a very long time. Unless they are primordial black holes, with less mass, which may have already evaporated.
The search for primordial black holes is one of the most advanced fields of study in astrophysics and is done with gravitational wave analysis. If found, it would be Stephen Hawking’s biggest win. (Spoiler: the hand of cards of Star Trek was won by Hawking with four of a kind 7s to beat Einstein who had raised thinking he was bluffing).
A work aimed at the curious public – On newsstands with a text by Carlo Rovelli
Saturday 8 January is the 80th anniversary of the birth of the great English physicist Stephen Hawking, who was born on 8 January 1942 and died on 14 March 2018. And again on 8 January it comes out on newsstands with the “Corriere della Sera” Hawking’s own book From the big bang to black holes. A brief history of time at the price of € 9.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. The volume, produced in collaboration with Rizzoli, remains on newsstands for a month and also contains the article by the physicist Carlo Rovelli published in “la Lettura” in memory of Hawking after his death. The British scientist from an early age had been struck by a very serious disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which had relegated him to a wheelchair and had progressively deprived him of the use of all the muscles in his body. He communicated with the movements of his eyes, through a speech synthesizer, but nevertheless he had made a great contribution to the progress of studies in the field of theoretical physics and had established himself as a sort of popular icon of science. «Stephen – writes Carlo Rovelli -, in his somewhat cheeky way of an eternal unpunished boy, has given the world an extraordinary human lesson. A lesson in love for life, for intelligence, for curiosity ». The volume From the big bang to black holes it is an example of the way in which Hawking managed to make even extremely complex concepts relating to spacetime, black holes, the origin and destiny of the universe in which we find ourselves understandable and accessible to the general public. The volume also contains portraits of great scientists of the past: Albert Einstein, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton.
January 7, 2022 (change January 8, 2022 | 08:58)
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