Andy Fabian, an astronomer at Hawking’s University of Cambridge and president of the Royal Astronomical Society, said Hawking would start his layman’s lectures on black holes with the joke: “I assume you all have read ‘A Brief History of Time’ and understood it.” It always got a big laugh.
“You’d find the average astronomer such as myself doesn’t even try to follow the more esoteric theories that (Hawking) pursued the last 20 years,” Fabian said. “I’ve been to talks Hawking has given and cannot follow them myself.”
Hawking, who was born 300 years to the day after Galileo died, was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. It was the same post that Isaac Newton held. Both physicists and astrophysicists claimed him as their own. And much of Hawking’s work was in the field of cosmology, a deep-thinking branch of astronomy that tries to explain the totality of the universe.
Hawking’s title “is not relevant here; what matters is what his brain did,” said Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York’s Hayden Planetarium. “We claim him as an astrophysicist because his laboratory was the universe.”
And Hawking’s black hole work in the mid-1970s made a crucial connection in physics. Until Hawking discovered radiation coming from black holes — named “Hawking radiation” after him — the two giant theories in physics, Einstein’s general relativity and quantum mechanics, often conflicted. Hawking was the first to show they connected, which Turner and others described as breakthrough at the time.
The concept that stuff, radiation, comes out of black holes may have upset science fiction authors, but it inspired young scientists such as Tyson, who described it as “spooky profound.” The idea behind this was also novel because it said “black holes aren’t forever,” Turner said.
“He was asking and trying to address the very biggest questions we were trying to ask: the birth of the universe, black holes, the direction of time,” said University of Chicago cosmologist Michael Turner. “I think that caught people’s attention.”
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