Don Page

Don Page, born in 1948, is an American-Canadian theoretical physicist who was both a close scientific collaborator and a personal friend of Hawking's. For a period in the 1970s he lived with the Hawking family in Cambridge, helping with care while working alongside Hawking on the frontier of black hole physics.

His own work

Page is best known for ideas that bear directly on the black hole information paradox. His analysis of how information might gradually emerge in the radiation from an evaporating black hole led to what is now called the "Page curve," a precise prediction of how the information content of Hawking radiation should change over the black hole's lifetime if information is, in fact, preserved. The Page curve has become one of the central reference points in modern attempts to resolve the paradox, and recent theoretical work has been celebrated partly for reproducing it.

His connection to Hawking

Beyond the physics, Page and Hawking made an interesting pair. Page is a devout evangelical Christian, while Hawking was an atheist, and the two are said to have enjoyed cheerful arguments about religion alongside their work. Their collaboration on the quantum behaviour of black holes in the 1970s came at the most fertile period of Hawking's research, and Page's later insights into the information question kept him engaged with the puzzle Hawking had created and wrestled with for the rest of his life.