(Fox News) — Stephen Hawking, the brilliant physicist and author who died Wednesday at 76, was undeniably our age’s most well-known scientist. But he was also a great paradox.
I first met Hawking when he came to speak at Harvard in the mid-1980s. Not yet famous to the general public, he was nevertheless a celebrity within scientific circles. So it was no surprise to me that a standing-room-only crowd of faculty and students squeezed into the Science Center to hear what he had to say.
Hawking’s main claims to fame back then were crazy-sounding ideas about black holes and the origin of the universe. At the heart of both, he said, were “singularities” – mind-bending entities that are at once infinitely small and infinitely large. That, you could say, is the first paradox I will always associate with Hawking’s long, distinguished life and career.
Back then, the young maverick was also raising eyebrows by challenging the prevailing belief that nothing could ever escape from the mortal grip of a black hole’s irresistible gravitational field. He claimed that under certain circumstances, light of various wavelengths – what came to be called “Hawking radiation” – could indeed escape. That’s paradox No. 2.
