In Hawking’s most famous book, A Brief History of Time, he makes the analogy that space is filled with particle-antiparticle pairs and that one member can escape (carrying positive energy) while the other falls in (with negative energy), leading to black hole decay. This flawed analogy continues to confuse generations of physicists and laypersons alike. (Credit: Ulf Leonhardt/University of St. Andrews)
In 1974, Stephen Hawking showed that even black holes don’t live forever, but emit radiation and eventually evaporate. Here’s how.
It’s truly a marvel how quickly our understanding of the Universe advanced during the 20th century. At the start of the 1900s, we…
