“Worse than that-losing its memory.”īack at that Moscow conference, we were all aware that he had achieved these insights in spite of his debilitating illness. If black holes are “wells of forgetfulness,” as Hawking put it recently, in which the past is lost for good, can nature be said to have laws at all? “It’s like the universe losing its cell phone,” Hawking said. This may not seem like a big deal-if you were careless enough to drop this article in a black hole, would you expect it to remain readable? But to physicists it was deeply unsettling. The laws of nature depend on events being predictable, in principle, from their pasts. And it had shocking implications: that black holes are not completely black-they emit radiation (now called “Hawking radiation”)-and that any information falling into a black hole is scrambled and lost forever. His work on black holes had built an elegant bridge between quantum theory and general relativity. For us younger physicists, he was already a revered figure. I first met Professor Hawking in 1987, when he attended a physics conference in Moscow.

His character distinguished him as one of its greatest men. His work distinguished him as one of the greatest physicists of our generation. Stephen Hawking, who passed away on March 14, exemplified this pattern. In individuals as different as Galileo, Darwin and Einstein, these values were present. To make the biggest imaginative leaps you need not just intellect but a particular set of values: courage, honesty, a certain rebelliousness, and ceaseless curiosity. The greatest scientists are remembered not only for their discoveries but for their characters.

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