stephen hawking biography youtube

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Stephen Hawking

Why you should listen.

A specialist in cosmology and quantum gravity and a devotee of black holes, Stephen Hawking probed the origins of the cosmos, the nature of time and the universe's ultimate fate -- earning him accolades including induction into the Order of the British Empire. To the public, he's best known as an author of bestsellers such as  The Universe in a Nutshell  and  A Brief History of Time , which have brought an appreciation of theoretical physics to millions. Though the motor neuron disorder ALS confined Hawking to a wheelchair, it didn't stop him from lecturing widely, making appearances on television shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Simpsons -- and planning a trip into orbit with Richard Branson 's Virgin Galactic. A true academic celebrity, he used his public appearances to raise awareness about potential global disasters -- such as global warming -- and to speak out for the future of humanity: "Getting a portion of the human race permanently off the planet is imperative for our future as a species," he said. Hawking served as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, where he contributed to both high-level physics and the popular understanding of our universe.

Stephen Hawking’s TED talk

Questioning the universe

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Stephen Hawking biography: Theories, books & quotes

A brief history of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

• Scientific achievements
• Filmography
• Quotes and controversial statements

Additional resources

Stephen Hawking is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history. 

His work on the origins and structure of the universe, from the Big Bang to black holes, revolutionized the field, while his best-selling books have appealed to readers who may not have Hawking's scientific background. Hawking died on March 14, 2018 , at the age of 76.

Stephen Hawking was seen by many as the world's smartest person, though he never revealed his IQ score. When asked about his IQ score by a New York Times reporter he replied, "I have no idea, people who boast about their IQ are losers," according to the news site The Atlantic .  

Related: 4 bizarre Stephen Hawking theories that turned out to be right (and 6 we're not sure about)

In this brief biography, we look at Hawking's education and career — ranging from his discoveries to the popular books he's written — and the disease that robbed him of mobility and speech.   

The early life of Stephen Hawking

British cosmologist Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England on Jan. 8, 1942  — 300 years to the day after the death of the astronomer Galileo Galilei . He attended University College, Oxford, where he studied physics, despite his father's urging to focus on medicine. Hawking went on to Cambridge to research cosmology , the study of the universe as a whole. 

In early 1963, just shy of his 21st birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) . Doctors told Hawkings that he would likely not survive more than two years with the disease. Completing his doctorate did not appear likely, but Hawking defied the odds. He also obtained his PhD in 1966 for his thesis entitled " Properties of expanding universes ". In that same year, Hawking also won the prestigious Adams Prize for his essay entitled "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time".

From then Hawking went on to forge new roads into the understanding of the universe in the decades since. 

As the disease spread, Hawking became less mobile and began using a wheelchair. Talking grew more challenging and, in 1985, an emergency tracheotomy caused his total loss of speech. A speech-generating device constructed at Cambridge, combined with a software program, served as his electronic voice, allowing Hawking to select his words by moving the muscles in his cheek.

Just before his diagnosis, Hawking met Jane Wilde, and the two were married in 1965. The couple had three children before separating in 1990. Hawking remarried in 1995 to Elaine Mason but divorced in 2006.

Stephen Hawking's greatest scientific achievements

Throughout his career, Hawking proposed several theories regarding astronomical anomalies, posed curious questions about the cosmos and enlightened the world about the origin of everything. Here are just some of the many milestones Hawking made in the name of science. 

In 1970, Hawkings and fellow physicist and Oxford classmate, Roger Penrose, published a joint paper entitled " The singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology ". In this paper, Hawking and Penrose proposed a new theory of spacetime singularities — a breakdown in the fabric of the universe found in one of Hawking's later discoveries, the black hole. This early work not only challenged concepts in physics but also supported the concept of the Big Bang as the birth of the universe, as outlined in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in the 1940s. 

Over the course of his career, Hawking studied the basic laws governing the universe. In 1974, Hawking published another paper called " Black hole explosions? ", in which he outlined a theorem that united Einstein's theory of general relativity, with quantum theory — which explains the behavior of matter and energy on an atomic level. In this new paper, Hawking hypothesized that matter not only fell into the gravitational pull of black holes but that photons radiated from them — which has now been confirmed in laboratory experiments by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel — aptly named "Hawking radiation". 

In 1974, Hawking was inducted into the Royal Society, a worldwide fellowship of scientists. Five years later, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the most famous academic chair in the world (the second holder was Sir Isaac Newton , also a member of the Royal Society).

During the 1980s, Hawking turned his attention to the Big Bang and the uncertainties about the beginning of the universe. "Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them. Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang," he said during his lecture called The Beginning of Time . In 1983, Hawking, along with scientists James Harlte, published a paper outlining their " no-boundary proposal " for the universe. In their paper, Hawking and Hartle describe the shape of the universe as reminiscent of a shuttlecock — with the Big Bang at the narrowest point and the expanding universe emerging from it.

Related: Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers

Books by Stephen Hawking

In the last three decades of Hawking's life, he not only continued to publish academic literature, but he also published several popular science books to share his theories of the history of the universe with the layperson. His most popular book " A Brief History of Time " (10th-anniversary edition: Bantam, 1998) was first published in 1988 and became an international bestseller. It has sold almost 10 million copies and has been translated into 40 different languages.

Hawking went on to write other nonfiction books aimed at non-scientists. These include " A Briefer History of Time ," " The Universe in a Nutshell ," " The Grand Design " and " On the Shoulders of Giants ." 

Along with his many successful books about the inner workings of the universe, Hawking also began a series of science fiction books called " George and the Big Bang ", with his daughter Lucy Hawking in 2011. Aimed at middle school children, the series follows George's adventures as he travels through space. 

Stephen Hawking's filmography

Hawking has made several television appearances, including a playing hologram of himself on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and a cameo on the television show "Big Bang Theory." He has also voiced himself in several episodes of the animated series "Futurama" and "The Simpson". In 1997, PBS also presented an educational miniseries titled " Stephen Hawking's Universe ," which probes the theories of the cosmologist. 

 In 2014, a movie based on Hawking's life was released. Called "The Theory of Everything," the film drew praise from Hawking , who said it made him reflect on his own life. "Although I'm severely disabled, I have been successful in my scientific work," Hawking wrote on Facebook in November 2014. "I travel widely and have been to Antarctica and Easter Island, down in a submarine and up on a zero-gravity flight. One day, I hope to go into space." 

Related: The Theory of Everything: Searching for the universal rules of physics

Stephen Hawking's quotes and controversial statements

Hawking's quotes range from notable to poetic to controversial. Among them: 

• "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? "— A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , 1988 
• "All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist."— Stephen Hawking's Universe , 1997.  
• "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in." — The Guardian, 2011 .
• "We should seek the greatest value of our action." — The Guardian, 2011. 
• "The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. "— A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , 1988.   
• "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."  
• "It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value." — Life in the Universe , 1996.  
• "One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem." — A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , 1988.  
• "It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining." — The Guardian, 2005 . 
• "I relish the rare opportunity I've been given to live the life of the mind. But I know I need my body and that it will not last forever." — Stem Cell Universe , 2014. 

A list of Hawking quotes would be incomplete without mentioning some of his more controversial statements.

He frequently said that humans must leave Earth if we wished to survive. 

• "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million...Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space," he said during an interview with video site Big Think , 2010. 
• "[W]e must … continue to go into space for the future of humanity…I don't think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet,"  Hawking said during a lecture at the Oxford Union debating society , 2016. 
• "We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth," he said during a speech at the Starmus Festival in Norway, 2017. 

He also said time travel should be possible, and that we should explore space for the romance of it. 

"Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out. I was one of the first to write about the conditions under which this would be possible. I showed it would require matter with negative energy density, which may not be available. Other scientists took courage from my paper and wrote further papers on the subject," he told the new site Parade in 2010. "Science is not only a disciple of reason, but, also, one of romance and passion," he adds.

The theoretical physicist was also concerned that robots could not only have an impact on the economy but also mean doom for humanity.

"The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining," he wrote in a 2016 column in The Guardian .

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he told the BBC in 2014. Hawking added, however, that AI developed to date has been helpful. It's more the self-replication potential that worries him. "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

"The genie is out of the bottle. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether," Hawking told WIRED in November 2017.

An avowed atheist, Hawking also occasionally waded into the topic of religion.

• "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." — The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. 
• "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail…There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he said during a 2011 interview with The Guardian .
• "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist," Hawking said in a 2014 interview with the news site El Mundo .  

For more information about Stephen Hawking, his theories and read through the many transcriptions of his influential lectures, check out his official website . You can also watch Hawking probe the origins of the cosmos in his extraordinary TED talk .  

Bibliography

#5: Stephen Hawking’s warning: Abandon earth-or face extinction . Big Think. (2010, July 27). https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/5-stephen-hawkings-warning-abandon-earth-or-face-extinction/

Beck, J. (2017, October 11). “people who boast about their IQ are losers.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/trump-tillerson-iq-brag-boast-psychology-study/542544/

The beginning of time . Stephen Hawking. (n.d.-c). https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/the-beginning-of-time

Guardian News and Media. (2005, September 27). Interview: Stephen Hawking . The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/27/scienceandnature.highereducationprofile

Guardian News and Media. (2011a, May 15). Stephen Hawking: “there is no heaven; it’s a Fairy story.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

Guardian News and Media. (2011b, May 15). Stephen Hawking: “there is no heaven; it’s a Fairy story.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

Guardian News and Media. (2016, December 1). This is the most dangerous time for our planet | Stephen Hawking . The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/stephen-hawking-dangerous-time-planet-inequality

Hartle, J. B., & Hawking, S. W. (1983, December 15). Wave function of the universe . Physical Review D. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.28.2960

Hawking radiation and the sonic black hole - technion - israel institute of technology . Technion. (2021, February 17). https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2021/02/hawking-radiation-and-the-sonic-black-hole/

Hawking, S. W. (1974, March 1). Black Hole Explosions? . Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0

Life in the universe . Stephen Hawking. (n.d.-a). https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/life-in-the-universe

Medeiros, J. (2017, November 28). Stephen Hawking: “I fear ai may replace humans altogether.” WIRED UK. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump

Oxford Union Speech . Stephen Hawking. (n.d.-b). https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/speeches/speech-5

Pablo Jáuregui, Enviado especial Guía de Isora (Tenerife), & Chocolatillo. (2018, March 14). Stephen Hawking: “no hay ningún dios. soy ateo.” ELMUNDO. https://www.elmundo.es/ciencia/2014/09/21/541dbc12ca474104078b4577.html

The singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology . Royal Society Publishing. (1970, January 27). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1970.0021

Hawking, S. W. (1966). Properties of expanding universes. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283

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A life in science: Stephen Hawking

The physicist and author, who has died at home in Cambridge, made intuitive leaps that will keep scientists busy for decades

• Stephen Hawking dies aged 76

Stephen Hawking always had something to say. He shook up the world of cosmology with more than 150 papers, dozens of which became renowned. He was told he had only a brief time on Earth, but spent half a century captivating audiences in lecture halls, on TV and in the pages of his books. For newspaper editors, almost any utterance of his could make a headline, and he knew it. Hawking warned about the threats of nuclear war, genetically modified viruses, artificial intelligence and marauding aliens. He pronounced on the human condition and once dismissed the role of God in creating the universe. The statement caused a fuss, as the denial of invisible superbeings still can in the 21st century.

It is an unwritten law of nature that when a personality steps into the foreground, their work must take a step back. In Hawking’s case, being the most famous scientist of our time had a mysterious ability to eclipse his actual achievements. At his best Hawking was spectacular: he made intuitive leaps that will keep scientists busy for decades.

It began with Albert Einstein. Where Isaac Newton had thought gravity was an attraction borne by the fields of massive objects, Einstein said mass curved space itself. By his reckoning, the planets of the solar system circled the sun not because of some unseen force, but simply because they followed the curvature of space. The late US physicist John Wheeler once summarised the theory with characteristic simplicity: “Matter tells space how to curve; space tells matter how to move.”

Einstein’s formulation of gravity, set forth a century ago in the general theory of relativity, raised an exotic and somewhat unsettling possibility: that a truly massive object, such as an enormous star, could collapse under its own gravity, and would then become a speck of infinite density called a singularity. The gravitational pull of these weird cosmic dots would be so intense that not even light could escape them.

The idea that singularities were real and lurked in the darkness of space was not taken terribly seriously at first. But that changed in the 1950s and 60s, when a clutch of papers found that singularities – now known as black holes, a term coined by Wheeler – were not only plausible but inevitable in the universe.

This led to a surge in fascination with the objects that coincided with Hawking’s arrival as a PhD student at Cambridge University.

Hawking was never one to think small. His goal was a complete understanding of the universe. So while others pondered the creation of black holes in space, Hawking applied the same thinking to the cosmos itself. He joined forces with Roger Penrose , the Oxford mathematician, and showed that if you played time backwards and rewound the story of the universe, the opening scene was a singularity. It meant that the universe, with all of its warming stars and turning planets, including Earth with all its lives, loves and heartbreaks, came from a dot far smaller than this full stop.

Even before they worked together, Penrose got a flavour of Hawking’s sharp mind. Penrose had delivered a lecture on the big bang and Hawking, nearly a decade his junior, was in the audience. “I remember him asking some very awkward questions at the end,” Penrose said. “He obviously knew the weak points in what I was saying. It was clear he was someone to contend with.”

Hawking went back to black holes for his next act. Although the matter at the heart of a black hole is compacted into an infinitesimal point, black holes spin and have a “size” that depends on the amount of mass that falls into them. The greater the mass, the larger they are, and the farther out the so-called event horizon, the point where light falling into the black hole cannot come out. A supermassive black hole such as the one at the centre of the Milky Way captures light from as far away as 12.5m kilometres. If the Earth, at a mere six billion trillion tonnes, were compressed into a singularity, the resulting black hole would measure less than 2cm wide.

In the late 1970s, Hawking declared that a black hole could only ever get bigger. The maths behind the claim was strikingly similar to the equation that underpins one of the fundamental laws of nature – that entropy, a measure of disorder, can also only increase. When one physicist, Jacob Bekenstein, declared that the similarity was no coincidence, and that the area of a black hole was actually a measure of its entropy, Hawking and many other physicists balked. For a black hole to have entropy, it must be hot and radiate heat. But as everyone knows, nothing can escape a black hole, not even radiation. Or can it?

When Hawking set out to prove Bekenstein wrong, he made the most spectacular discovery of his career. Black holes did have a temperature, they did radiate heat – later known as Hawking radiation – and they could therefore shrink with time. As he remarked some time later: “Black holes ain’t so black.” It meant that, given enough time, a black hole would simply evaporate out of existence. For a typical black hole, that time is longer than the age of the universe. However, mini black holes, which are smaller than atoms, would be more dynamic, releasing heat with ferocious intensity until they finally explode with the energy of a million one megaton hydrogen bombs.

Hawking’s revelation shocked cosmologists, and the claim threw up a fresh and thorny problem that became known as the black hole information paradox. As Hawking himself realised, if black holes simply evaporated, then all of the information they held from infalling stars, planets and clouds of cosmic dust could be lost forever. It might not make for sleepless nights for most people, but most people are not theoretical physicists. The loss of information from the universe would contradict a basic rule of quantum mechanics. Hawking argued, nevertheless, that black holes destroyed information, while other physicists vehemently disagreed. In 1997, one of them, John Preskill at the California Institute of Technology, accepted a bet on the subject from Hawking. To the winner was promised an encyclopaedia of his choosing.

Marika Taylor, a former student of Hawking’s and now professor of theoretical physics at Southampton University, says that while the information paradox remains a paradox today, most physicists now believe that information is not destroyed in black holes. The answer may lie in the principles of holography, the process of capturing a 3D image on a two-dimensional sheet. When applied to black holes, the holographic principle shows that the event horizon can keep an audit of whatever falls inside. How it does so is unclear, but according to the theory, it retains a kind of imprint of the information. “Many people think that effectively, the black hole event horizon itself behaves like a giant computer hard disk,” Taylor said. “When the black hole evaporates into radiation, the information will be carefully encoded in the radiation that comes out.”

Hawking conceded his bet in 2004 and handed Preskill a copy of Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopaedia. But even as he admitted defeat, Hawking was convinced the information released by a black hole would be mangled and impossible to read. To make the point, Hawking quipped that he should have burned the encyclopaedia and given Preskill the ashes.

To settle the matter once and for all, scientists need to detect Hawking radiation as it streams from a black hole and read the information it carries. But that is a fanciful idea. “We’d have to sit for millions or even billions of years to see this,” said Taylor. A more realistic hope is that subtle features of black holes may leave their mark on the gravitational waves that physicists can now detect with instruments such as Ligo, the US laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory.

Hawking was, of course, far more than just a physicist. The stratospheric success of A Brief History of Time was driven by a blend of charisma, good writing, a profound theme and an excellent title. It put hard physics in the hands of millions, and even if millions did not finish the book, it changed the world. “If you look at the popular science press in physics, it looks totally different from 30 years ago,” said Sabine Hossenfelder, a research fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies. “Everybody wants to know about black holes. People talk about the big bang over dinner. And Hawking has played a large role in this.” Hossenfelder read A Brief History of Time before she became a teenager. “I hated it because I didn’t understand anything,” she said. “And it’s the reason I’m a physicist today, because I thought I have to understand it.”

For Max Tegmark, a physics professor at MIT, Hawking was one of the most influential scientists of all time. The two worked together to raise publicity over the threats of nuclear war and the potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence. He was a person who wasn’t afraid to think about the big questions, Tegmark said. Having been told he would die young, Hawking pushed for actions that would ensure humanity did not. He thought we should “stop rolling the dice,” Tegmark said, and “plan ahead, to take advantage of this incredible cosmic opportunity we have.”

Hawking took opportunities whenever they arose, and his legacy will be richer for it. “When you think of the impact that Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and others have had, it’s mainly in the past,” Tegmark said. “But when you think of the impact of Stephen Hawking, it’s clearly mostly in the future still. Stephen is going to be guiding our research for years to come.”

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Comment and Physics

A brief history of stephen hawking: a legacy of paradox.

By Stuart Clark

14 March 2018

Gemma Levine/Getty

Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist, has died at the age of 76.

Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.

“He once said: ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him for ever.”

Stephen Hawking dies aged 76

Tributes flow in following the death of world-famous theoretical physicist stephen hawking.

The most recognisable scientist of our age, Hawking holds an iconic status. His genre-defining book, A Brief History of Time , has sold more than 10 million copies since its publication in 1988, and has been translated into more than 35 languages. He appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation , The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory . His early life was the subject of an Oscar-winning performance by Eddie Redmayne in the 2014 film  The Theory of Everything . He was routinely consulted for oracular pronouncements on everything from time travel and alien life to Middle Eastern politics and nefarious robots . He had an endearing sense of humour and a daredevil attitude – relatable human traits that, combined with his seemingly superhuman mind, made Hawking eminently marketable.

But his cultural status – amplified by his disability and the media storm it invoked – often overshadowed his scientific legacy. That’s a shame for the man who discovered what might prove to be the key clue to the theory of everything , advanced our understanding of space and time, helped shape the course of physics for the last four decades and whose insight continues to drive progress in fundamental physics today.

Beginning with the big bang

Hawking’s research career began with disappointment. Arriving at the University of Cambridge in 1962 to begin his PhD, he was told that Fred Hoyle , his chosen supervisor, already had a full complement of students. The most famous British astrophysicist at the time, Hoyle was a magnet for the more ambitious students. Hawking didn’t make the cut. Instead, he was to work with Dennis Sciama, a physicist Hawking knew nothing about. In the same year, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neurone disease that quickly robs people of the ability to voluntarily move their muscles. He was told he had two years to live.

Although Hawking’s body may have weakened, his intellect stayed sharp. Two years into his PhD, he was having trouble walking and talking, but it was clear that the disease was progressing more slowly than the doctors had initially feared. Meanwhile, his engagement to Jane Wilde – with whom he later had three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim – renewed his drive to make real progress in physics.

Stephen and Lucy Hawking

James Veysey/Camera Press

Working with Sciama had its advantages. Hoyle’s fame meant that he was seldom in the department, whereas Sciama was around and eager to talk. Those discussions stimulated the young Hawking to pursue his own scientific vision. Hoyle was vehemently opposed to the big bang theory (in fact, he had coined the name “big bang” in mockery). Sciama, on the other hand, was happy for Hawking to investigate the beginning of time.

Time’s arrow

Hawking was studying the work of Roger Penrose , which proved that if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, at the heart of every black hole must be a point where space and time themselves break down – a singularity. Hawking realised that if time’s arrow were reversed, the same reasoning would hold true for the universe as a whole. Under Sciama’s encouragement, he worked out the maths and was able to prove it: the universe according to general relativity began in a singularity.

Hawking was well aware, however, that Einstein didn’t have the last word. General relativity, which describes space and time on a large scale, doesn’t take into account quantum mechanics , which describes matter’s strange behaviour at much smaller scales. Some unknown “theory of everything” was needed to unite the two. For Hawking, the singularity at the universe’s origin did not signal the breakdown of space and time; it signalled the need for quantum gravity .

Luckily, the link that he forged between Penrose’s singularity and the singularity at the big bang provided a key clue for finding such a theory. If physicists wanted to understand the origin of the universe, Hawking had just shown them exactly where to look: a black hole .

Black holes were a subject ripe for investigation in the early 1970s. Although Karl Schwarzschild had found such objects lurking in the equations of general relativity back in 1915, theoreticians viewed them as mere mathematical anomalies and were reluctant to believe they could actually exist.

Albeit frightening, their action is reasonably straightforward: black holes have such strong gravitational fields that nothing, not even light, can escape their grip. Any matter that falls into one is forever lost to the outside world. This, however, is a dagger in the heart of thermodynamics.

Stephen Hawking's final theorem turns time and causality inside out

In his final years, Stephen Hawking tackled the question of why the universe appears fine-tuned for life. His collaborator Thomas Hertog explains the radical solution they came up with

Thermodynamic threat

The second law of thermodynamics is one of the most well-established laws of nature. It states that the entropy, or level of disorder in a system, always increases. The second law gives form to the observation that ice cubes will melt into a puddle, but a puddle of water will never spontaneously turn into a block of ice. All matter contains entropy, so what happens when it is dropped into a black hole? Is entropy lost along with it? If so, the total entropy of the universe goes down and black holes would violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Hawking thought that this was fine. He was happy to discard any concept that stood in the way to a deeper truth. And if that meant the second law, then so be it.

Bekenstein and breakthrough

But Hawking met his match at a 1972 physics summer school in the French ski resort of Les Houches, France. Princeton University graduate student Jacob Bekenstein thought that the second law of thermodynamics should apply to black holes too. Bekenstein had been studying the entropy problem and had reached a possible solution thanks to an earlier insight of Hawking’s .

A black hole hides its singularity with a boundary known as the event horizon. Nothing that crosses the event horizon can ever return to the outside. Hawking’s work had shown that the area of a black hole’s event horizon never decreases over time. What’s more, when matter falls into a black hole, the area of its event horizon grows.

Bekenstein realised this was key to the entropy problem. Every time a black hole swallows matter, its entropy appears to be lost, and at the same time, its event horizon grows. So, Bekenstein suggested, what if – to preserve the second law – the area of the horizon is itself a measure of entropy?

Hawking immediately disliked the idea and was angry that his own work had been used in support of a concept so flawed. With entropy comes heat, but the black hole couldn’t be radiating heat – nothing can escape its pull of gravity. During a break from the lectures, Hawking got together with colleagues Brandon Carter, who also studied under Sciama, and James Bardeen, of the University of Washington, and confronted Bekenstein.

The disagreement bothered Bekenstein. “These three were senior people. I was just out of my PhD. You worry whether you are just stupid and these guys know the truth,” he recalls.

Back in Cambridge, Hawking set out to prove Bekenstein wrong. Instead, he discovered the precise form of the mathematical relationship between entropy and the black hole’s horizon. Rather than destroying the idea, he had confirmed it. It was Hawking’s greatest breakthrough.

Hawking radiation

Hawking now embraced the idea that thermodynamics played a part in black holes. Anything that has entropy, he reasoned, also has a temperature – and anything that has a temperature can radiate.

His original mistake, Hawking realised, was in only considering general relativity, which says that nothing – no particles, no heat – can escape the grip of a black hole. That changes when quantum mechanics comes into play. According to quantum mechanics, fleeting pairs of particles and antiparticles are constantly appearing out of empty space, only to annihilate and disappear in the blink of an eye. When this happens in the vicinity of an event horizon, a particle-antiparticle pair can be separated – one falls behind the horizon while one escapes, leaving them forever unable to meet and annihilate. The orphaned particles stream away from the black hole’s edge as radiation. The randomness of quantum creation becomes the randomness of heat.

“I think most physicists would agree that Hawking’s greatest contribution is the prediction that black holes emit radiation,” says Sean Carroll , a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “While we still don’t have experimental confirmation that Hawking’s prediction is true, nearly every expert believes he was right.”

Experiments to test Hawking’s prediction are so difficult because the more massive a black hole is, the lower its temperature. For a large black hole – the kind astronomers can study with a telescope – the temperature of the radiation is too insignificant to measure. As Hawking himself often noted, it was for this reason that he was never awarded a Nobel Prize. Still, the prediction was enough to secure him a prime place in the annals of science, and the quantum particles that stream from the black hole’s edge would forever be known as Hawking radiation .

Some have suggested that they should more appropriately be called Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, but Bekenstein himself rejects this. “The entropy of a black hole is called Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, which I think is fine. I wrote it down first, Hawking found the numerical value of the constant, so together we found the formula as it is today. The radiation was really Hawking’s work. I had no idea how a black hole could radiate. Hawking brought that out very clearly. So that should be called Hawking radiation.”

Theory of everything

The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy equation is the one Hawking asked to have engraved on his tombstone. It represents the ultimate mash-up of physical disciplines because it contains Newton’s constant, which clearly relates to gravity; Planck’s constant, which betrays quantum mechanics at play; the speed of light, the talisman of Einstein’s relativity; and the Boltzmann constant, the herald of thermodynamics.

The presence of these diverse constants hinted at a theory of everything, in which all physics is unified. Furthermore, it strongly corroborated Hawking’s original hunch that understanding black holes would be key in unlocking that deeper theory.

Hawking’s breakthrough may have solved the entropy problem, but it raised an even more difficult problem in its wake. If black holes can radiate, they will eventually evaporate and disappear. So what happens to all the information that fell in? Does it vanish too? If so, it will violate a central tenet of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, if it escapes from the black hole, it will violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. With the discovery of black hole radiation, Hawking had pit the ultimate laws of physics against one another. The black hole information loss paradox had been born.

Hawking staked his position in another ground-breaking and even more contentious paper entitled Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse, published in Physical Review D in 1976. He argued that when a black hole radiates away its mass, it does take all of its information with it – despite the fact that quantum mechanics expressly forbids information loss. Soon other physicists would pick sides, for or against this idea, in a debate that continues to this day. Indeed, many feel that information loss is the most pressing obstacle in understanding quantum gravity.

“Hawking’s 1976 argument that black holes lose information is a towering achievement, perhaps one of the most consequential discoveries on the theoretical side of physics since the subject was invented,” says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley.

By the late 1990s, results emerging from string theory had most theoretical physicists convinced that Hawking was wrong about information loss, but Hawking, known for his stubbornness, dug in his heels. It wasn’t until 2004 that he would change his mind. And he did it with flair – dramatically showing up at a conference in Dublin and announcing his updated view : black holes cannot lose information.

Today, however, a new paradox known as the firewall has thrown everything into doubt (see “Hawking’s paradox”, below). It is clear that the question Hawking raised is at the core of the quest for quantum gravity.

“Black hole radiation raises serious puzzles we are still working very hard to understand,” says Carroll . “It’s fair to say that Hawking radiation is the single biggest clue we have to the ultimate reconciliation of quantum mechanics and gravity, arguably the greatest challenge facing theoretical physics today.”

Hawking’s legacy, says Bousso, will be “having put his finger on the key difficulty in the search for a theory of everything”.

Hawking continued pushing the boundaries of theoretical physics at a seemingly impossible pace for the rest of his life. He made important inroads towards understanding how quantum mechanics applies to the universe as a whole, leading the way in the field known as quantum cosmology. His progressive disease pushed him to tackle problems in novel ways, which contributed to his remarkable intuition for his subject. As he lost the ability to write out long, complicated equations, Hawking found new and inventive methods to solve problems in his head, usually by reimagining them in geometric form. But, like Einstein before him, Hawking never produced anything quite as revolutionary as his early work.

“Hawking’s most influential work was done in the 1970s, when he was younger,” says Carroll, “but that’s completely standard even for physicists who aren’t burdened with a debilitating neurone disease.”

Stephen Hawking's black hole paradox may finally have a solution

Black holes may not destroy all information about what they were originally made of, according to a new set of quantum calculations, which would solve a major physics paradox first described by Stephen Hawking

Hawking the superstar

In the meantime, the publication of A Brief History of Time catapulted Hawking to cultural stardom and gave a fresh face to theoretical physics. He never seemed to mind. “In front of the camera, Hawking played the character of Hawking. He seemed to play with his cultural status,” says Hélène Mialet, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who courted controversy in 2012 with the publication of her book Hawking Incorporated. In it, she investigated the way the people around Hawking helped him build and maintain his public image .

That public image undoubtedly made his life easier than it might otherwise have been. As Hawking’s disease progressed, technologists gladly provided increasingly complicated machines to allow him to communicate. This, in turn, let him continue doing the thing for which he should ultimately be remembered: his science.

“Stephen Hawking has done more to advance our understanding of gravitation than anyone since Einstein,” Carroll says. “He was a world-leading theoretical physicist, clearly the best in the world for his time among those working at the intersection of gravity and quantum mechanics, and he did it all in the face of a terrible disease. He is an inspirational figure, and history will certainly remember him that way.”

Hawking's paradox

In 2012, four physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara – Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski and James Sully, known collectively by physicists as AMPS – shocked the physics community with the results of a thought experiment .

When pairs of particles and antiparticles spawn near a black hole's event horizon, each pair shares a connection called entanglement. But what happens to this link and the information it holds when one of the pair falls in, leaving its twin to become a particle of Hawking radiation (see main story)?

One school of thought holds that the information is preserved as the hole evaporates, and that it is placed into subtle correlations among these particles of Hawking radiation.

But, AMPS asked, what does it look like to observers inside and outside the black hole? Enter Alice and Bob.

According to Bob, who remains outside the black hole, that particle has been separated from its antiparticle partner by the horizon. In order to preserve information, it must become entangled with another particle of Hawking radiation.

But what's happening from the point of view of Alice, who falls into the black hole? General relativity says that for a free-falling observer, gravity disappears, so she doesn't see the event horizon. According to Alice, the particle in question remains entangled with its antiparticle partner, because there is no horizon to separate them. The paradox is born.

So who is right? Bob or Alice? If it's Bob, then Alice will not encounter empty space at the horizon as general relativity claims. Instead she will be burned to a crisp by a wall of Hawking radiation – a firewall. If it's Alice who's right, then information will be lost, breaking a fundamental rule of quantum mechanics. "The fervent controversy surrounding Hawking's paradox reflects the stakes his work has raised: in quantising gravity, what gives? And how much?" says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. The answer awaits us in the theory of everything. Amanda Gefter

Article amended on 14 March 2018

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How to watch 'The Theory of Everything' Stephen Hawking biopic

Streaming options for the Stephen Hawking movie are scant, but there's an array of ways to rent or own the film that documents his incredible life.

British theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, one of the most famous scientists of all time, died Tuesday at age of 76 , prompting an outpouring of sadness and immense admiration from around the world. 

One way to remember Hawking's remarkable life is to watch the film based on it. " The Theory of Everything ," released in 2014, is an Oscar-nominated biographical film on Hawking that documents his life before, during and after his diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at age 21. His doctors told him then that he had two years left to live. 

The film isn't available for streaming on Netflix, but you still have some options:

• Amazon : It's available for streaming to Amazon  members with a Cinemax subscription. Alternatively, you can rent the film through Prime for $2.99 (£2.49) in standard definition (SD) or $3.99 (£3.49) in high definition (HD), or buy it in SD for $9.99 (£5.99) or $13.99 in HD (£5.99).
• Apple iTunes : You'll find "The Theory of Everything" for $14.99 in HD on iTunes (AU$9.99, £5.99).
• Google Play : Android users can rent the film for $3.99 in the Google Play store (AU$3.99, £5.99).
• YouTube : It's also $3.99 (£5.99) to rent on the Google-owned YouTube. 
• Microsoft Store : Microsoft offers the movie download for $9.99 in SD (£4.99) and $13.99 in HD (£8.99). Both versions cost AU$9.99 in Australia.
• Vudu : Vudu provides the same rent and download options as Amazon, and the option to buy the Blu-ray for $14.96. 

In 2015, Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Hawking. The film is based on "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen," a memoir by Hawking's ex-wife, Jane Hawking.

Remembering Stephen Hawking

• Stephen Hawking tributes pour in: 'Funny, perverse, brilliant'
• Famed physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76
• 'Star Trek' to 'Simpsons,' Hawking was a pop culture physicist
• Stephen Hawking is only dead in this universe

Hawking was a regular on set while the film was being made, Redmayne told the LA Times back in 2014 , and made a particularly noteworthy appearance while the crew was shooting a scene involving fireworks.

"Stephen arrived with his iconic silhouette -- him in his chair, flanked by his nurses -- uplit by his computer screen. There was this extraordinary spotlight on him," Redmayne said. "And then on cue, the fireworks went off. It was the greatest rock-star entrance I've seen in my life."

Stephen Hawking’s brilliance in 9 quotes

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Technically Literate : Original works of short fiction with unique perspectives on tech, exclusively on CNET.

7 Fascinating Facts About Stephen Hawking

In honor of his inspiring endurance, and his immense contributions to the understanding of the cosmos that swirls around us, here are seven facts about the life of this otherworldly scientist:

He was an average student in elementary school

Hawking didn’t have the sort of sparkling early academic career you'd expect from a Grade-A genius. He claimed he didn't learn to properly read until he was 8 years old, and his grades never surpassed the average scores of his classmates at St. Albans School. Of course, there was a reason those same classmates nicknamed him "Einstein"; Hawking built a computer with friends as a teenager and demonstrated a tremendous capacity for grasping issues of space and time. He also got it together when it counted, dominating his Oxford entrance exams to score a scholarship to study physics at age 17.

Upon his ALS diagnosis, Hawking was told he only had two-and-a-half years to live

After falling while ice skating during his first year as a grad student at Cambridge University, Hawking was told he had the degenerative motor neuron disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and had only two-and-a-half years to live. Obviously that prognosis was light years off, but it seems early onset of the disease was a blessing in disguise, of sorts. Most ALS patients are diagnosed in their mid-50s and live another two to five years, but those diagnosed earlier tend to have a slower-progressing form of the disease. Furthermore, the loss of motor skills forced the burgeoning cosmologist to become more creative. "By losing the finer dexterity of my hands, I was forced to travel through the universe in my mind and try to visualize the ways in which it worked," he later noted.

He was initially puzzled by his own equation

Hawking's equation, which involves the speed of light, Newton’s constant and other symbols that make the non-mathematically inclined run for cover, measures emissions from black holes that today is known as Hawking radiation. Hawking was initially puzzled by these findings, as he believed black holes to be celestial death traps that swallowed up all energy. However, he determined there was room for this phenomenon through the merging of quantum theory, general relativity and thermodynamics, distilling it all into one (relatively) simple but elegant formula in 1974. Already known for establishing important ground rules about the properties of black holes, this discovery kicked his career into a higher gear and set him on the path to stardom. Hawking later said he would like this equation to be carved on his tombstone.

Hawking almost died in 1985

Although the doomsday predictions of his early doctors were off, Hawking did almost die after contracting pneumonia while traveling to Geneva in 1985. While he was unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator, the option of removing the fragile scientist from life support was being considered until his then-wife, Jane, rejected the idea. Hawking instead underwent a tracheotomy, an operation that helped him breathe but permanently took away his ability to speak, prompting the creation of his famous speech synthesizer.

He considered his non-descript computer voice part of his identity

Hawking's original synthesizer was created by a California-based company called Words Plus, which ran a speech program called Equalizer on an Apple II computer. Adapted to a portable system that could be mounted on a wheelchair, the program enabled Hawking to "speak" by using a hand clicker to choose words on a screen. After he eventually lost use of his hands, Hawking had an infrared switch mounted on his glasses that generated words by detecting cheek movement. He also had the communication technology overhauled by Intel, though he insisted on retaining the same robotic voice with its distinctly non-British accent he'd been using for three decades, as he considered it an indelible part of his identity.

Hawking wrote books using his vocal synthesizer

Hawking long believed he could write a book about the mysteries of the universe that would connect with the public, a task that seemed all but impossible after he lost the abilities to write and speak. However, he painstakingly pressed forward with his speech synthesizer, receiving valuable assistance from students who relayed draft revisions with his editor in the United States via speakerphone. Hawking's vision ultimately was realized, as A Brief History of Time landed on the London Sunday Times best-seller list for 237 weeks after its publication in 1988. He went on to pen an autobiography, several other books about his field and a series of science-themed novels, co-written with his daughter, Lucy.

He had a wicked sense of humor

Despite his extraordinary physical challenges, Hawking wasn't shy about appearing on television. He first appeared as himself on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , cracking jokes while playing poker with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton . He also lent his voice to the animated shows The Simpsons and Futurama , and, fittingly, surfaced on the hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory . Of course, screen time wasn’t only about laughs for the world-renowned physicist, who returned to his bread-and-butter topics of cosmology and the origins of life for his six-part 1997 miniseries Stephen Hawking's Universe . He also provided plenty of stark, sobering descriptions of his life for the 2013 documentary Hawking .

READ MORE: 10 of Stephen Hawking's Best Zingers

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10 facts about Stephen Hawking

Learn about one of the most influential scientists of our time….

On 14 March 2018, Stephen Hawking passed away aged 76. Meet the inspirational British scientist in our Stephen Hawking facts..

Stephen Hawking facts

Full name: Stephen William Hawking Born: 8 January 1942 Hometown: Oxford, England Occupation: Scientist Died: 14 March 2018 Best known for: His work on explaining the origins of the universe and black holes

1) Stephen grew up in a house where education was very important. His parents were both academics who had studied at Oxford University . Dinner times were often spent in silence while the family read books!

2) When he was a teenager, Stephen and his friends built a computer out of old clock parts, telephone switchboards and other recycled items. His friends nicknamed him, ‘ Einstein ‘!

3) When Stephen was 17, he went to Oxford University to study physics and chemistry . He later said that he found his first year very boring! After graduating from Oxford, he went to  Cambridge University to further his studies in cosmology (the science of the origin of the universe).

4) Sadly, when he was 21 , Stephen was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND) and told that he only had two years to live . MND gradually affects the brain cells that communicate with the body’s muscles. Over time, sufferers struggle to walk, talk and even swallow without help.

5) Stephen used walking sticks and crutches after his diagnosis, but as his illness got worse he had to use an electric wheelchair to get around. He became notorious for driving it a little too fast around the streets of Cambridge and running over other students’ toes!

6) Stephen made many important contributions to the world of science . He developed  theories about how the world began and furthered our understanding of black holes , stars and the universe.

7) Stephen was always keen for his work to be accessible to everyone, not just scientists. He wrote books that explained his theories in simple terms for everyone to understand, including a children’s book. His most famous book, A Brief History of Time , sold more than 10 million copies !

8) In 1985 , Stephen developed a life-threatening infection. He had an emergency operation that saved his life but left him unable to talk. He was given a  special computer that talked for him, which he controlled by moving a muscle in his cheek – clever !

9) Stephen has received many awards for his work including the 1979 Albert Einstein Medal , the Order of the British Empire (Commander) in 1982 and the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics.

10) Stephen is remembered as an inspiration to many people. He had an amazing mind, incredible determination and didn’t let his illness stand in his way. He defied doctors’ predictions, living for a further 55 years after his diagnosis.

What do you think of our Stephen Hawking facts? Let us know by leaving a comment, below!

Images ⓒ getty images: stephen hawking (95774294), (460199068 ), (476665123), (877190322), leave a comment.

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Stephen Hawking: A timeline of his life

The renowned physicist died aged 76.

US President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking during a ceremony in the East Room at the White House on August 12, 2009. Jewel Samad / AFP

Here are 10 key dates in the life of renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking, who died Wednesday at the age 76:

- January 8, 1942: He is born in the city of Oxford.

- 1962: With a degree in physics from the University of Oxford, he undertakes research in cosmology at Cambridge, completing a doctorate thesis entitled "Properties of the Expanding Universes".

- 1963: He learns that he suffers from a form of the degenerative and paralysing motor-neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

- 1965: He marries Jane Wilde, with whom he has three children before they separate after 25 years. In 1995 he marries his former nurse, Elaine Mason; they too divorce after several years.

- 1974: He becomes at 32 one of the youngest members of the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific body.

____________

Stephen Hawking dies aged 76

Dr Jane Hawking: Her own theory on it all

Stephen Hawking and his five-decade fight with ALS

- 1979: He is appointed Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post he occupies for 30 years.

- 1985: He loses the ability to speak after undergoing a tracheotomy to help him breathe after contracting pneumonia. This results eventually in his use of a computer and a voice synthesiser to communicate.

- 1988: Hawking publishes A Brief History of Time , which seeks to explain to non-scientists the fundamental theories of the universe. It becomes an international bestseller, bringing him global acclaim.

- 2007: He goes on a weightless flight in the United States as a prelude to a hoped-for sub-orbital spaceflight.

- 2014: The Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything , by director James Marsh, is released. British actor Eddie Redmayne goes on to win an Oscar for his portrayal of the scientist.

View from London

Your weekly update from the UK and Europe

Stephen Hawking's eerie alien theory might explain why we've never been contacted

A theory as to why we haven't heard from aliens which renowned theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking agreed with has resurfaced online.

Planet Earth is about the size of a speck of dust when compared to the whole universe and the likelihood of there being other intelligent life out there is pretty high, even though it's a scary thought, right?

Scientists and experts have a number of theories as to why that is but a particular one that Stephen Hawking agreed with has come up again online, getting a lot of people talking.

Actor and author Kalpana Pot posted a TikTok video on her account summing up the theory.

In the video, she says: "Take a look at our Milky Way galaxy. Some estimates say it has 400 billion stars and possibly trillions of planets.

"Even if a tiny fraction of those planets have intelligent life, that's still a big number - small amounts in space terms is still a lot.

"We've been scanning the skies for signals for over 60 years but it's been radio silent, so to speak.

"We've been sending out our own signals intentionally and unintentionally for over a century yet no responses and that's where the paradox comes in.

"So again, in such a vast universe and galaxy, where the f**k is everyone?"

Kalpana goes on to share what she describes as the 'darkest' theory out there.

"There are lots of answers, well, opinions to this question but there's one that stands out as the darkest and that's the 'dark forest hypothesis'," she says.

"It states that there probably is a lot of intelligent life but they know to stay silent.

"They could be too afraid to send signals for fear of being discovered because maybe there's a d*******g alien civilisation out there that will completely eliminate you.

"When you look at all life on Earth, at our core, we're just trying to survive and will eliminate any threat we perceive.

"This could be true for all life out there and if that's the case and we've sent a lot of signals, we might have f****d ourselves.

"This hypothesis could also be projecting, we don't know, but it is one that Stephen Hawking agreed with."

A number of users commented on the video.

Wayne Luke said: "Space is also very vast... Trillions could be screaming into the void and we may never hear them."

Baugnasty said: "The dark forest theory is kind of unsettling."

Carl_Nelsnow said: "Isn't it more likely that the civilizations are too far apart from each other to ever communicate or travel between?"

Tiny goat said: "Life is everywhere in the universe! Everyone is just so far apart and cannot communicate!"

Hers said: "If we only been sending signals for 100 years... They probably haven't traveled far enough."

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