Events

Abstract: We reconstruct Stephen Hawking’s path towards black hole radiation and evaporation in 1974.  We focus in particular on his idea of primordial black holes and their possible observable consequences, further developed together with his PhD students Gary Gibbons and Bernard Carr, and presented at a key international conference in Poland in the fall of 1973. There, he also met Russian bomb veteran Ya.B. Zeldovich, who earlier had urged Hawking to reconsider his negative opinion on the possibility of gravitational particle creation, and was developing such ideas for rotating black holes himself. Hawking’s novel insight, in the end, was that particle creation persisted even for Schwarzschild black holes, but originated in the preceding gravitational collapse process. We review Hawking’s computation and relate its elements to his earlier work and style.  In our account, the ideas of black hole thermodynamics from the PhD thesis of Jakob Bekenstein were received particularly negatively by Hawking: he barely acknowledged Bekenstein’s work, while also engaging in a priority dispute with him. This dynamic repeated itself with a number of other authors, and our story seeks to discuss how notions of collective achievement versus singular ‘genius’ may serve the historiography of physics.