“This was a form of insurance policy for me. But when push came to shove, Hawking bet against Cygnus X-1. On December 10, 1974, Hawking made a bet with Caltech theoretical physicist Kip Thorne over whether Cygnus X-1, a massive x-ray source in our galaxy, was a black hole.

But the mischievous cosmologist had a long history of high-profile scientific wagers- many of which he has lost. To those familiar with Hawking’s work, which focused on the mysteries of black holes, it may be surprising that Hawking once bet against their existence. Here, we revisit more of the most famous wagers and provocative statements that Hawking made during his more than 40 years of public life. That bombshell, which inspired a whole new way of looking at black holes through a quantum lens, would certainly not be the last time Hawking made shocking pronouncements about the nature of the cosmos.įor his final paper, submitted to the Journal of High-Energy Physics just 10 days before his death and published this week, Hawking and colleague Thomas Hertog at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium propose a new theory about what happened in the aftermath of the big bang, and what that means for the existence of multiple universes existing alongside our own. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking, who died in March at age 76, turned the physics world upside down when he announced that black holes aren’t so black after all, and that some light can in fact escape the singularity’s edge, called the event horizon. This article was originally published on March 14.

Ufo alien invasion set difficulty