Investigation into the mysteries of the universe. Hawking’s discoveries with «Corriere»- Corriere.it

Stephen Hawking was the man of big challenges; first of all with himself and then with the idea of ​​the universe that he has tried to decipher. An almost congenital idea that emerged as a life necessity and had already manifested itself when he was still a high school student, so much so that he was nicknamed “Einstein” by his classmates. His story, for better or for worse, began when he entered Oxford University fascinated by Fred Hoyle, the greatest British astronomer of the day. But just in those sixties, while discovering the beauty of exploring science, he was suddenly confronted with a terrible disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. And it was extraordinary how since then Hawking found an unimaginable strength to face the challenges of the universe.

“When you are faced with the possibility of premature death – he wrote – you realize that life is worth living”. The rapidly and inexorably progressing disease also took away his speech, as well as imprisoning him more and more in his gestures, but the scientist showed his genius, as we discover in the Corriere della Sera series on newsstands from March 14, always accompanied by a smile of mind. It was a defiance of life and the cynicism of medical science that she promised only a few months to live. Fortunately wrong.

Looking at the mysteries of the universe it was inevitable that his research was drawn to the most intriguing enigma, black holesthe monsters of the sky generated by the death of some stars, capable of swallowing matter and light, becoming a dark spot in the firmament.

Did everything disappear in the maelstrom of gravitation? Hawking found a surprising answer, not accepted by all physicists. «Any material object falling into a black hole – he explained – would be destroyed by the singularity (where time and space cancel each other out, ed) and only the gravitational effect of its mass would continue to be perceptible outside. On the other hand, if quantum effects were taken into account, it would appear that the mass or energy of the material object would eventually be returned to the rest of the universe and that the black hole would evaporate and finally disappear completely.” It was the discovery that revolutionized the idea of ​​celestial monsters, dubbed “Hawking radiation”.

At this point, like Albert Einstein, he faced the dream that haunts all scientists: the idea of ​​a theory of everything. And like Einstein he will get nowhere. “Why does the universe bother to exist?” Hawking wondered, opening his thoughts to speculation, but adding that philosophers are unable to answer.

Why this happens, we asked him in an interview during his visit to Padua. “Philosophers,” he answered in his computer-synthesized voice, “have not kept pace with modern developments in physics and biology. As a result, their discussions seem increasingly dated and out of place. It is no good dismissing science as mere technical detail. Darwin, molecular biology and modern cosmology brought about a profound change in the way we see ourselves and our place in the universe. Philosophy should reflect on these aspects if it does not want to become a banal linguistic game».

Hawking, even in physical captivity, was far from melancholy. Not a believer, he agreed to marry in church and when Jane, a fervent practitioner, reminded him that for her the first place in life belonged to God, the scientist replied: “It doesn’t bother me to find myself in second place after God”. And then Jane married Elain, her nurse (“a passionate and stormy marriage”) from whom he divorced, resuming relations with Jane and her three children. When at CERN in Geneva physicists were hunting for the Higgs boson, he bet that they would not succeed. “I think it would be more exciting if we didn’t find it, it would show that there is something wrong with our ideas and that we need to think more.”

In the last few years he looked to the universe as a means of escape and survival for our species, blaming the attitudes of man on Earth. «Due to the changing climate and the progressive depletion of resources we have to look elsewhere. And the only place we can go is other worlds, other solar systems. Going out and spreading ourselves may be the only way forward that can save us from ourselves. I am convinced that humanity must leave the Earth.”

In April 2007 he sort of prepared himself experiencing for a few minutes the absence of gravity on the astronauts’ plane. And in 2018 Hawking, a student of cosmic time, left us after defeating the time of illness. But his ideas are alive and animate discussions about our future.

The volume. Looking for an explanation of the origins of the cosmos

The book by Stephen W. Hawking will be released on 14 March on newsstands with the «Corriere della Sera» The theory of everything. Origin and destiny of the universeat the price of And
7,90 plus the cost of the newspaper. This is the first volume of a series of titles, created in collaboration with Bur Rizzoli (the plan of the work in the graph on the right), which offers readers the works of the famous British physicist and cosmologist who died on March 14 five years ago: a figure who has struck the collective imagination, to become an icon of our time, for his genius, his skills as a popularizer, the particular determination with which he faced the degenerative disease that had struck him at a young age. Hawking was born in Oxford in 1942. A brilliant and precocious student, in 1963 he began to experience the first difficulties, which soon forced him into a wheelchair. Despite the poor prognosis of the doctors, who didn’t give him more than two years to live, he continued his studies, married twice and had three children, albeit with growing problems which from the 1980s onwards made continuous assistance necessary. Meanwhile Hawking established himself not only as a scientist, but also as a popularizer for the exemplary clarity of his prose even when he tackled extremely complex subjects. The book The theory of the tea
all comprises seven lectures delivered at the University of Cambridge, in which the author tries to present a picture of what is believed to be the history of the universe and illustrates the efforts being made to «find a unified theory which includes, in a The only coherent explanation is quantum mechanics, gravity, and the other interactions that physics talks about.”