Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8th 1942 in Oxford, England and passed away on March 14, 2018. Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist, author and cosmologist.He suffered from ALS which rendered him unable to speak or move without assistance from other people. Though Hawking was disabled, he was one of the most brilliant minds in the scientific community.  Hs legacy will live on and below are some theories and projects he had in mind.

Starshot

Stephen Hawking had and idea to send a small space craft (Starshot) to our closest star (Alpha Centauri) using a giant laser, this is known as laser propulsion (or Photonic propulsion) which works just how it sounds. A laser beam is used to propel a vehicle very rapidly through space. The lasers use light that carries momentum, so If you have a very big laser and a small spacecraft you can launch it very far and very fast. What they want to do is build a tiny spacecraft connected to a reflective sail that stretches a few meters wide but is only a couple of atoms thick.  It will also be carrying cameras power supplies and a communications device. They will have an array of laser amplifiers were the lasers shoot up to can be adjusted so they create one big laser and carry the spacecraft, the lasers will be turned on to for three to five minutes which is one fifth the speed of light. At that pace the spacecraft should get to alpha centauri in twenty years, which might seem like a long time but consider that NASA’s voyager one spacecraft has been traveling at four miles per hour since 1977.

Black Holes

One of Hawking’s ideas changed the way we saw black holes. Hawking worked with physicist Roger Penrose and theorized that if you were able to travel to the center of a black hole you would be able to find something called a singularity.  A singularity is where matter is squashed into such a small space that the force of gravity becomes infinite, crushing everything into a point of infinite density. You might think a vacuum is empty but its not at least according to quantum physics  it is fizzing with particles and antiparticles that pop into existence from nowhere then disappear. This happens at a edge of a black hole one of the particles can fall in leaving the other behind. This tiny stream of escaping particles is known as “Hawking Radiation” now those particles that fell into the black hole they have a negative mass which will cause the black hole to eventually disappear it will take awhile but in its final moments the black hole will explode with the force of a million nuclear bombs, leaving nothing behind.

Stephen Hawking overcame his physical disabilities to become one of the most brilliant minds in the scientific community. Although he has passed, his theories and research will live on forever.