A visionary minded physicist, a scientific promoter, a guru of modern cosmology: Stephen Hawking – who passed away at the age of 76 on March 14, 2018 – has not only been a brilliant scientist, but also a contemporary pop icon, very familiar to the fans of the TV series The Simpsons and to the ones of Star Trek, and during the last period of his life also to the young followers of the boy band One Direction or to the fans of The Big Bang Theory.
In the movie “The Theory of Everything” we have learned the most intimate and dramatic aspects of his exceptional story, but the life of Stephen Hawking is filled with many stories and curiosities, some of which are probably less known to the general public. For instance, did you know about the bet he made forty years ago on black holes? What about his contribution to rock music? Below are 10 facts you should know about the British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking.
Back in 1975 Stephen Hawking stated that black holes were objects able to “devour” everything, also destroying the information of what they swallowed to, perhaps, make it appear again in another universe. His revolutionary theory conflicted with quantum mechanics, which states that the information contained in matter can not be lost entirely.
This is why the physicist John Preskill of the Californian Institute of Technology bet with Hawking that this was a blunder. The prize was a baseball encyclopedia, that almost 30 years later Hawking gave in the hands of his colleague: in 2004, in a conference in Dublin, he sportingly admitted that “I was wrong about black holes”.