Simplifying black holes, debunking information paradox: Stephen Hawking’s biggest contributions to science

8th January marks the birth anniversary of revered theoretical physicist, a man who made everyone with an Internet connection into an armchair cosmologist, Stephen Hawking.

Hawking’s story is inspiring not only because of the incredible feat he achieved despite suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, but because he made complicated concepts of quantum physics like black holes, Hawking radiation and singularity easy to understand for the common man.

They say ‘not even light can escape a black hole’, but Hawking’s light of knowledge shall continue to illuminate not just these giant voids but every dark and unexplored corner of the universe that is unknown to mankind.


On the occasion of his 78th birth anniversary, we take a look at some of the most vital and significant contributions of Stephen Hawking to the field of physics and science.

Black Holes, no more a theory

Perhaps, one of Stephen Hawking’s most important contributions to physics was giving mathematical backing to the existence of blackholes which was predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity back in 1915.

Prior to Hawking’s mathematical proof, black holes existed only in theory. In a 2018 article on website space.com, Tom Banks, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers University-New Brunswick said, "Hawking actually proved some rigorous mathematical theorems about Einstein's equations for gravity that showed that, under quite general circumstances, there were places where the equations broke down — what are called singularities. And, in particular, the region inside of a black hole is such a singularity."

Wondering what is ‘singularity’? Singularity can simply be defined as a divide by zero error. It is essentially an imaginary point in space time where all the laws of physics break down and do not make any sense.

It was Stephen Hawking who proved the existence of singularity, a point of infinite density in a black hole, thus legitimizing Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, a truly incredible feat.

Hawking Radiation

Initially, Hawking was of the opinion that the size of a black hole is constant and it never changes. However, the scientist soon discovered ‘Hawking Radiation’. He proved that black holes can actually shrink as they radiate energy (Hawking Radiation) which reduces their mass.

As a result, black holes have the tendency of evaporating or boiling themselves away ‘in a brilliant burst of energy equivalent to a million 1-megaton hydrogen bombs’.

Hawking theorized that this radiation comes from "virtual particles," which are constantly popping into and out of existence in the bizarre quantum realm. They do so in matter-antimatter pairs, one of which has positive energy and the other negative energy.

Information paradox debunked

The legitimacy of Stephen Hawking’s theories was often questioned. ‘Information paradox’ was one such anomaly that couldn’t be explained by Hawking’s theories.

According to Hawking when a star dies, all of its mass collapses into a single point of infinite density (singularity) which leads to the formation of a black hole. A star contains information in itself, such as the speed at which it spins, its density and size.

However, when a black hole collapses all that information is apparently lost. This violates the basic principle of quantum physics that information cannot be destroyed; it stays constant.

Hawking debunked the paradox by arguing that the information isn’t actually lost but it is encoded in the particles that the radiation emits.

Hawking was indeed a force to be reckoned with in the world of physics and needless to say, his contributions to the field of physics are unparalleled and unmatched.