08 / People
Stephen Hawking's Key Collaborators
Hawking's best work was rarely solitary. These are the scientists, Penrose, Thorne, Hartle, Bekenstein and others, whose ideas were woven through his own.
The popular image of Hawking is of a lone genius, but his most important work was deeply collaborative. The singularity theorems, the no-boundary proposal, the laws of black hole thermodynamics, each was shaped by a partnership with another formidable mind. These pages introduce the scientists who mattered most to his work, who they were in their own right, and exactly how their paths crossed his.
See also the scientists Hawking himself trained, in students and academic lineage.
Roger Penrose
The mathematician whose geometric methods reshaped Hawking's thinking, his closest scientific collaborator, and a Nobel laureate in his own right.
Read →Kip Thorne
The American physicist behind the detection of gravitational waves, a Nobel laureate, the science of Interstellar, and Hawking's friend and partner in a series of famous scientific bets.
Read →James Hartle
The American physicist who, with Hawking, proposed the no-boundary model of the universe, one of the boldest attempts ever made to explain how the cosmos began.
Read →Jacob Bekenstein
The physicist who first proposed that black holes have entropy, an idea Hawking initially resisted, then proved, giving us the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.
Read →Dennis Sciama
Hawking's doctoral supervisor at Cambridge, and one of the great mentors of modern cosmology, who guided a generation of British physicists.
Read →Leonard Mlodinow
The physicist and acclaimed science writer who co-authored two of Hawking's later books, helping him reach a new generation of readers.
Read →Don Page
A long-time collaborator and friend who once lived with the Hawking family, and whose work on black hole radiation lies at the heart of the information paradox.
Read →Brandon Carter
The physicist who co-authored the four laws of black hole mechanics with Hawking, and who gave the anthropic principle its name.
Read →George Ellis
The South African cosmologist who co-wrote Hawking's rigorous technical masterwork on the structure of spacetime, and later a leading voice on the philosophy of science.
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