Stephen Hawking Receives Copley Medal 118
smooth wombat writes "Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Royal Society's 275th Copley medal for his contribution to cosmology and theoretical physics. Other notables to receive the award, established by Stephen Gray in 1731 'For his new Electrical Experiments', include Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein. In his remarks, Professor Hawking reiterated his previous comments that man must colonize other planets. The medal presented to Professor Hawking was sent into space onboard Space Shuttle Discovery and spent some time on the International Space Station in July of this year. Hawking has expressed an interest in going into space and commented, 'My next goal is to go into space, maybe Richard Branson will help me.'"
Re:I'm embarassed to ask, but-- (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?
His most recent paper of interest is the 2005 paper on information loss in black holes, where he argues that information can in fact leak out of a black hole due to a quantum mechanical effect. The irony of this paper is that he made a public bet with another famous general relativity researcher 9 years ago that information which went into the black hole could never come out again. After publishing his paper, Hawking conceded the bet, though the paper is still somewhat controversial in the field.
Re:I'm embarassed to ask, but-- (Score:3, Informative)
Nevertheless, relatively recently, (and motivated by something very strange called the AdS/CFT correspondence), he and collaborators came up with the first formulations of black holes in higher dimensions with cosmological terms (loosely speaking, a small default curvature of the universe completely independent of gravity). These are now a huge area of research, and prompted his former student Gary Gibbons (together with collaborators) to find the completely general analogue of the rotating cosmological black hole (Carter-Kerr solution). These are of massive interest to mathematicians as well as physicists because they produce nice new geometries in higher dimensions.
He has also claimed to solve (his own) Black Hole Information Paradox, but the "Wick rotation" he uses (temporarily replacing the square root of -1 with 1, doing calculations, and then putting it back in again) in order to make certain analytic continuations make sense is widely seen as highly dubious.
He has also recently done work on inflation and cosmology about which I am not competent to comment.
Re:Space Colonies: A Waste of Resources? (Score:4, Informative)
Saying that the former is essential is not saying that efforts should not expended on the latter. And, in fact, getting to the point where people can productively and sustainably live on other planets requires lots and lots of fairly generally applicable basic research that would do much to enable new ways of improving life on this planet.