Stephen Hawking

person · earth

British theoretical physicist who supplied both the strongest classical result about black hole horizons and the quantum calculation that undermined it. In 1971 he proved that the total horizon area cannot decrease in classical general relativity. In 1974 he showed that once quantum fields are included the horizon radiates thermally, so a black hole has a temperature, does lose mass, and the area theorem holds only classically. In 1976 he drew the conclusion that made the subject a foundational problem rather than an astrophysical one: if the radiation is genuinely thermal, information about what formed the hole is destroyed, which quantum mechanics forbids. He defended that position for decades, wagered on it publicly against John Preskill, and conceded the bet in 2004 - a concession many physicists regarded as premature, since the mechanism he offered was not generally accepted. Not a place.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.