Stephen Hawking Universe In a Nutshell

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Hawking, Stephen, The Universe in a Nutshell. New York: Bantam Books, 2001. 201 pgs., glossary, index, illustrations, charts. Stephen Williams Hawking attended the University College, Oxford. After three years he was awarded a first class honors degree in Natural Science. Hawking then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology. After gaining his doctorate he became a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, he headed to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1979, and held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009. He is still an active part of Cambridge University and retains an office at the Department for Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics. His title is now 'Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. His other books include A Brief Time in History and Black Holes and Baby Universes. In The Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking’s thesis is that “general relativity is a classical theory that does not incorporate the uncertainty of quantum theory that governs all other forces we know” and “to understand the origin and fate of the universe, we need a quantum theory of gravity” (p.43). Black holes arise in general relativity, a classical theory of gravity. However, Hawking states we need to include quantum effects to understand black holes properly. Roger Penrose and Hawking showed that, according to general relativity, any object that collapses to form a black hole will go on to collapse to a singularity inside the black hole. This means that there are strong gravitational effects on arbitrarily short distance scales inside a black hole. On short distance scales, we certainly need to use a quantum theory to describe the collapsing matter. The presence of a singularity in the classical theory also means that once we go

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