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Sir Stephen hawking

This is the equation that Stephen Hawking wanted to be printed on his tombstone.
This equation is known as Hawking's equation and denotes the entropy of a Black Hole.

Where S stands for entropy of a black hole,h stands for Planck's constant,G is for Newton's constant, A is for area of event horizon, c is speed of light and k stands for Boltzmann constant.


The black hole, as illustrated in the movie Interstellar.

nterstellar / R. Hurt / Caltech

The formula is the centerpiece of our understanding of black holes and a crowning achievement for Hawking, who worked on it with his colleague Jacob Bekenstein. It connects important thermodynamical quantities such as entropy.

Entropy is described in school physics textbooks as a measure of disorder within a macroscopic system. But it can also be defined as the amount of information that you can pack into an object. And this is the crucial importance of the formula. The entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area, not its volume. The surface of the black hole is its event horizon, beyond which, nothing can escape.
Hawking himself extended this work to a more general and far-reaching interpretation. The whole universe could be seen as having a “cosmological event horizon” suggesting that the universe as a whole has an entropy value and a specific temperature. This idea was the base for the formulation of the holographic principle, suggesting that all the information encoded in the universe can be interpreted from the properties of a lower dimensional boundary.
There is also another interesting parallel that makes Professor Hawking's wish even more poignant. The first proposer of entropy was Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann and his tombstone bears the inscription of his own entropy formula. It seems right that Hawking should have his own, too.

Comments

  1. Awesome post! He was definitely a phenomenal being that will be missed!

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