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He grew
up near London and was educated at Oxford, from which he received his BA in
1962,
and Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in theoretical physics. Stephen
Hawking is a brilliant and highly productive researcher, and, since 1979, he has
held the Lucasian professorship in mathematics at Cambridge, the very chair once
held by Isaac Newton. Although still relatively young, Hawking is already being
compared to such great intellects as Newton and Albert Einstein. Yet it should
be noted that since the early 1960s he has been the victim of a progressive and
incurable motorneurone disease, ALS, that now confines him to a wheelchair.
This affliction prevents Hawking from reading, writing, or calculating in a
direct and simple way. The bulk of his work, involving studying, publishing,
lecturing, and worldwide travel, is carried on with the help of colleagues,
friends, and his wife. Of his illness, Hawking has said that it has enhanced
his career by giving him the freedom to think about physics and the Universe.
Stephen Hawking has written many essays involving the unified theory,
which is a theory summarizing the entire of the physical world; a theory that
would stand as a complete, consistent theory of the physical interactions that
would describe all possible observations. Our attempts at modeling physical
reality normally consists of two parts: a) A set of local laws that are obeyed
by the various physical quantities, formulated in terms of differential
equations, and b) Sets of boundary conditions that tell us the state of some
regions of the universe at a certain time and what effects propagate into it
subsequently from the rest of the universe. Presently, physicist are still
trying to unify two separate theories to describe everything in the universe.
The two theories are the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
Albert Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity almost
single-handedly in 1915. First, in 1905, he developed the special theory of
relativity, which deals with the concept of people measuring different time
intervals, while moving at different speeds, yet measuring the same speed for
the light was shined. In this way, it was theorized that the more accurately
you want to measure the position of the particle, the greater the energy packet
you would have to use and thus the more you would disturb the particle. This
dilemma is called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
Einstein's general theory of relativity is a classic theory because it
does not take into account the uncertainty principle. One therefore has to find
a new theory that combines general relativity and the uncertainty principle. In
most situations, the difference between the general relativity theory and the
new theory is very small. However, the singularity theorems that Hawking proved
show that space-time will become highly curved on very small scales. The
effects of the uncertainty principle will then become very important.
The problems that Einstein had with quantum mechanics is that he used
the commonsense notion that a particle has a definite history. And that a
particle has a definite location. But, it must be taken into account that a
particle has an infinite set of histories. A famous thought experiment called
Shroedinger's cat helps to illustrate this concept. Let's say that a cat is
placed in a sealed box and a gun is pointed at it. The gun will only go off if
a radioactive nucleus decays. There is exactly a 50% chance of this happening.
Later on, before the box is opened, there are two possibilities of what happened
to the cat: the gun did not go off, and the cat is alive, or the gun did go off,
and the cat is dead. Before the box is opened, the cat is both alive and dead
at the same time. The cat has two separate histories.
Another way to think of this was put forth by a physicist Richard
Feynman. He contributed that a system didn't just have a single history in
space-time, but it had every possible history. "Consider, for example, a
particle at point A at a certain time. Normally, one would assume that the
particle would move in a straight line away from A. However, according to the
sum over histories, it can move on any path that starts at A. (Hawking)" It's
like what happens when you place a drop of ink on blotting paper, and it
diffuses along every path away from its point of origin.
moving in space. Then, the curvature of space can lead to the three directions
and the imaginary time direction meeting up around the back. These would form a
closed surface, like the surface of the earth. Stephen Hawking as a physicist
has many much progress in the use of imaginary time in the way the field of
physics thinks.