Stephen Hawking: A Bibliography of His Scientific Papers

This is a curated bibliography of Stephen Hawking's most significant scientific papers, organised by decade. For each, the citation is given as published, followed by a plain-English note on what it contributed. Citations here are drawn from the official record maintained by the Hawking Estate and the American Physical Society; for the complete list of well over a hundred papers, see the official publications list and the APS collection of his Physical Review papers. For the landmark works explained at length, see his key scientific papers.

The 1960s: singularities

Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime. Adams Prize Essay, 1966 (published in European Physical Journal H, 2014). His prize-winning essay, joint winner with Roger Penrose, generalising Penrose's singularity methods to cosmology. A founding document of his early career, drawn from his PhD thesis.

The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology (with R. Penrose). Proceedings of the Royal Society A 314 (1970) 529. The definitive singularity theorem, showing the universe must have begun from a singularity. Though published in 1970, it crowns the 1960s programme. See the singularity theorems.

The 1970s: the great decade

Gravitational Radiation from Colliding Black Holes. Physical Review Letters 26 (1971) 1344. Introduced what became the black hole area theorem, that horizon area cannot decrease. In 2021 this was confirmed using gravitational waves, as described in his legacy today.

The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics (with J. Bardeen and B. Carter). Communications in Mathematical Physics 31 (1973) 161. Set out laws of black holes mirroring thermodynamics, at first thought to be only an analogy. See black hole thermodynamics.

The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (with G. F. R. Ellis). Cambridge University Press, 1973. His influential technical monograph, still cited today, co-authored with George Ellis.

Black hole explosions? Nature 248 (1974) 30. The bombshell: black holes are not entirely black but emit radiation. The foundation of Hawking radiation.

Particle Creation by Black Holes. Communications in Mathematical Physics 43 (1975) 199. The full, rigorous derivation of Hawking radiation, and arguably his single most important paper.

Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse. Physical Review D 14 (1976) 2460. Argued that black holes destroy information, launching the information paradox.

Action Integrals and Partition Functions in Quantum Gravity (with G. Gibbons). Physical Review D 15 (1977) 2752. Introduced the Gibbons-Hawking approach to gravitational thermodynamics and the Euclidean path integral.

Cosmological Event Horizons, Thermodynamics, and Particle Creation (with G. Gibbons). Physical Review D 15 (1977) 2738. Extended his thermodynamic insights from black holes to the cosmological horizon of an expanding universe.

The 1980s: quantum cosmology

Wave Function of the Universe (with J. Hartle). Physical Review D 28 (1983) 2960. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal, describing a universe with no initial edge in time. See imaginary time and the no-boundary proposal and James Hartle.

The Development of Irregularities in a Single Bubble Inflationary Universe. Physics Letters B 115 (1982) 295. Part of the pivotal early-1980s work on how quantum fluctuations seed cosmic structure during inflation.

The Quantum State of the Universe. Nuclear Physics B 239 (1984) 257. A major development of his quantum cosmology programme.

The 1990s: wormholes, information and the arrow of time

The Chronology Protection Conjecture. Physical Review D 46 (1992) 603. Argued the laws of physics conspire to forbid time travel into the past, keeping the universe "safe for historians." See Hawking on time travel.

The Origin of Time Asymmetry (with R. Laflamme and G. Lyons). Physical Review D 47 (1993) 5342. Work on the arrow of time; notably, his student Raymond Laflamme helped change his mind on the direction of time in a contracting universe.

The Nature of Space and Time (with R. Penrose). Princeton University Press, 1996. A famous published debate with Penrose on the meaning of quantum gravity.

The 2000s: inflation and the top-down approach

Populating the Landscape: A Top Down Approach (with T. Hertog). Physical Review D 73 (2006) 123527. A late-career proposal, with Thomas Hertog, for how to do cosmology in a multiverse, reasoning backward from the present.

Information Loss in Black Holes. Physical Review D 72 (2005) 084013. His paper following his 2004 public concession that information is, after all, preserved, settling the famous bet recounted in Hawking's famous bets.

The 2010s: soft hair and a final paper

Soft Hair on Black Holes (with M. Perry and A. Strominger). Physical Review Letters 116 (2016) 231301. A late, influential attempt to solve the information paradox using "soft" zero-energy particles on the horizon.

A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? (with T. Hertog). Journal of High Energy Physics (2018). Submitted shortly before his death and published posthumously, proposing a way to make the multiverse testable. His final scientific paper.

A note on completeness

This bibliography is selective by design: it highlights the papers that mattered most, with citations verified against primary sources. Hawking published well over a hundred scientific works across more than fifty years, and the full record, including conference proceedings and lectures, is best consulted through the official estate list. For our wider sourcing approach, see our sources and method.

Sources

The citations on this page (journal, year, volume and co-authors) have been checked against primary and authoritative records:

1. The Stephen Hawking Estate official publications list: hawking.org.uk/in-print.
2. The American Physical Society collection of Hawking's papers in Physical Review and Physical Review Letters: journals.aps.org/collections/stephen-hawking.
3. Individual journal records and DOIs for each paper listed.

Where a date is given as the year of publication, note that some papers circulated as preprints earlier. For the complete record, including conference proceedings and lectures not listed here, consult the official estate list above.