What do you think of Stephen Hawking?

He thought we understood quantum mechanics well enough and, indeed, he was successful in applying it without worrying about any foundational questions. But the no boundary proposal motivated new formulations of quantum mechanics that Stephen Hawkings Radical Thinking were adequate for cosmology—decoherent histories, in particular. The usual textbook formulations of quantum mechanics are inadequate for cosmology, not least because they predict probabilities of measurements made by observers.

In 1979, Stephen was appointed to one of the most distinguished posts in the university as the seventeenth holder of the Lucasian Chair of Natural Philosophy, some 310 years after Isaac Newton became its second holder. Stephen held this chair with distinction for 30 years until reaching the retirement age in 2009, after which he held a special research professorship, thanks to a generous endowment by the Avery–Tsui Foundation. Dennis Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery had earlier provided substantial support to the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in DAMTP. Stephen, with his family, visited Caltech in Pasadena for the academic year 1974 to 1975 as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, Caltech’s highest award.

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In 1969 he was elected to full fellowship of Gonville and Caius College for Distinction in Science. After the creation of the Institute of Astronomy in 1972, Stephen remained there as a research assistant for two years before gaining a more permanent status at DAMTP. By this time, the originality and importance of Stephen’s work was recognized world-wide and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 at the exceptionally early age of 32. He would receive the Society’s highest honour, the Copley Medal, in 2006. Certainly, Hawking makes no dogmatic claim for the truth of this insight. To qualify as science, any theory for the origin of the universe must make predictions that can be tested against experience. At present, no ensemble of observations elucidates the precise nature of the big bang.

It is shown that a singularity is inevitable provided that certain very general conditions are satisfied. Stephen next used asymptotic expansions and the Newman–Penrose formalism to examine gravitational radiation in the expanding universe—this became chapter 3 of his dissertation. Such radiation analyses in asymptotically flat universes were hot topics at the time.

Stephen Hawking and the Science of Black Holes

In the course of this highly innovative work, Stephen gained assistance from several colleagues, most notably from Brandon Carter, then a co-PhD student in DAMTP, who pointed out various technical errors in earlier drafts, all of https://www.wave-accounting.net/ which Stephen was able to circumvent. In addition to colleagues mentioned above, Stephen acknowledged useful discussions with Sciama, Charles Misner and Larry Shepley, and the ideas continued to be developed in further papers .