Hawking, Stephen William
This cosmological thread led him to the study of black holes and his suggestion that following the big bang primordial, or mini, black holes—objects of immense mass occupying only the space of an elementary particle—were formed. He also showed that the surface area of a black hole can increase but never decrease, that there is a limit on the radiation emitted when black holes collide, and that a single black hole cannot cleave into two black holes. In 1974 Hawking calculated that black holes thermally create and emit subatomic particles until they exhaust their energy and explode. This so-called Hawking radiation linked gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics mathematically for the first time. Hawking proposed in 1981 that although the universe has no boundary, it is finite in space-time; he collaborated with James Hartle to formulate this mathematically in 1983. His work with Hartle also implied that the big bang could have created multiple universes.
Hawking wrote an explanation of his work that became a popular best seller,
See memoir by J. Hawking, his first wife (upd. ed. 2007); M. White,
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