Albert Einsteins Theory of Relativity; without it Stephan Hawking would never been able to form his Theory of Singularities. If you have read Hawkings A Brief History of Time, as I have, you will know & perhaps understand where the Big Bang came from but not what caused it. In a black hole a huge amount of matter crushes to a tiny point. Relativity says nothing can exist on the edge of a black hole - everything is sucked in, but quantum mechanics says space is never empty, it is full of tiny pairs of particles. Space is essentially empty to us, & it is empty, but on a very tiny level it is not empty at all, it is filled with tiny particles, virtual tiny particles coming into existence & annihilating each other. Energy waves in space create tiny pairs of paricles...one has positive energy, one has negative energy. These pairs appear to collide & destroy each other. It was Stephan Hawking who played with this in his mind & asked what happens if I put a virtual pair next to a black hole, what happens? In a flash of inspiration Hawking realised that when a pair of particles are on the edge of a black hole, the one with negative energy is sucked in while the one with positive energy escapes, it escapes as radiation. Hawking realised that blck holes give of heat. This heat is known as Hawking Radiation. When Hawking first announced the results of his calculations, he was greeted by the world of science with increduality...black holes are not supposed to emit anything was what the world replied to hawking.But this isThis is the closest anyone has ever come to a theory of everything. Then, in 1971 a scientist observed something in space that emits energy; it looks like the core of a collapsed star. Cosmoligists the world over wondered if this could actually be a black hole? It is known as Signus X1.
Posted on: Fri, 29 Nov 2013 06:13:42 +0000
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