on my flight back from amsterdam at the end of spring break, i finally had the opportunity and wherewithal to watch the theory of everything, the stephen hawking biopic from a couple of years ago. it got me thinking about a lot of things from my physics education in high school and more recently my pursuit of an undergraduate physics degree. i remembered in 10th grade my physics teacher talking about uniting all the forces in the universe in one “beautiful, elegant” equation which would provide a grand unifying framework for all of physics in the universe. pretty lofty stuff.
in the movie we learn (albeit very minimally) about hawking radiation, the theoretical model of which hawking developed in 1976. so what is it? essentially it is when the fluctuation in energy in the black hole engenders a particle-antiparticle pair of imaginary particles near the event horizon. one slips into the black hole before they have a chance to completely annihilate each other, so it appears to an observer that a particle was emitted from the black hole! the particle that gets absorbed then has a negative energy!
this is fascinating stuff – enough to warrant eddie redmayne’s best actor oscar!
