they've announced a two special prizes
from the fundamental physics foundation
a special prize that's run by a a guy
Russian billionaire called yuri milner
the amount of money that's awarded for
these prizes is basically the largest
amount of money that's ever awarded for
a physics prize it's a three million
dollars so that completely torse
what the Nobel Prize winners gets or
Templeton Prize winners
they've announced two special prizes
today one to Stephen Hawking and the
other to s77 physicists it's a committee
that basically decides who's going to
get the prize for the subsequent year
and that's made up of previous Prize
winners so there's a bunch of people
that got it in the summer and they they
and basically they've got together and
they've decided like who's going to get
the prize next year well they've decided
who's going to be nominated but also
they're allowed to make a little special
recommendation in certain cases where
it's not part of the main prize but they
just decide that somebody's deserves a
special prize and it's for the same
amount of money and that's the those are
the announcements that have been made
today along with nominations for next
year's prize well say and obviously
speaks for itself for what's what
they've achieved at the the LHC Hawking
well we all we've all heard of him he's
one of the most famous physicists alive
today if not the most famous but
specifically he's won the prize for his
contributions to black hole physics and
quantum gravity so academically clearly
he deserves it back in the 60s and 70s
Hawking did some fantastic work and it's
completely revolutionized how we
understand black holes and similarly his
ideas about quantum gravity in the
universe it really important I do think
that the prize itself three million
dollars Hawking doesn't really need that
money actually he's a millionaire anyway
and sometimes you know somebody's going
to throw this amount of money as Milner
is it physics then I'd probably prefer
he it was spread out more evenly and it
was that used to fund younger
researchers rather than just given a pat
on the back to the the really famous
guys I suppose there is an argument
which says that that it raises the
profile of physics and that's got to be
a good thing as well but certainly from
an academic point of view I think
Hawking is a worthy recipient so Hawking
basically as it had three main
scientific achievements in his in his in
his career so the first of these is his
singularity theorems
so what Hawking and Roger Penrose
realized is that if you assume matter
has some generic properties that are
very that every type of that a sensible
type of matter that we see in nature it
has then you can prove that
singularities exist
within Einstein's theory of relativity
so a singularity is is a region of
infinite density and infinite space-time
curvature where all your field equations
break down what they're telling us here
is that Einstein's theory actually has
its limitations that it predicts it's
don't own downfall the second thing
another place where you get these
singularities of course is is in black
holes at the center of a black hole a
star collapses and it forms one of these
objects people often say black holes are
black that literally no light can escape
because the gravitational field is so
strong but what Hawking realized and
this is probably his greatest
achievement was that when you apply
quantum mechanics particularly to the
event horizon of a black hole then you
can get particle creation on sort of
either side of the event horizon so you
have a particle and an antiparticle
literally pop into existence so the
particle escapes and the antiparticle
falls into the black hole and this
process allows a black hole to actually
radiate to actually give off radiation
which as you said is Hawking radiation
and a black hole will actually you know
it can radiate away as a result of this
process although we still don't
understand the endpoint of that the that
evaporation process we know that it'll
radiate radiate radiate but what happens
at the end actually when it gets a very
small Planck incites black hole we we
don't really know what happens there
Terry I thought black holes have never
actually been observed so how do we know
Hawking radiation is correct so we don't
know Hawking radiation is correct but
this is one of the points of the prize
so that there is no experimental proof
of Hawking radiation and it's possible
that we might produce a black hole at
the LHC and if we did then that could
that we've detect the hawking radiation
that's how we would know it was there
and then we'd say okay right give
Hawking the Nobel Prize maybe some other
people too for for related work but
there's no proof of this at the moment
and certainly you ain't going to detect
the Hawking radiation from the black
hole at the center of the galaxy if
there is one there so the question is
how talking ever going to get a prize
for this remarkable work well this is
the point of this prize that
I think nowadays theoretical physics has
advanced so much and the gap between
theory and experiments in terms of time
scale is so large that I will be
surprised if after they after the
discovery of the Higgs that any theorist
will get a Nobel Prize again certainly
in this area of cosmology quantum
gravity simply because the gap between
theory and experiments is becoming so
large so that's one of the good things
about this prize it fills that gap it
doesn't demand that there has to be
experimental proof it's just that the
community itself has accepted that black
holes will give off Hawking radiation
so the third discovery of Hawking or I
say I'm loath to say discovery because
these these are not proven these these
things yet but they're great ideas and
the third thing that Hawking introduced
was the idea of the wave function of the
universe in quantum mechanics everything
is described by wave functions so you
know you don't have any sort of definite
state anymore everything's just a a
mixture of different possible scenarios
hawking applied this idea to the
universe and in particular he's been
able to do away with the singularity at
the beginning of the universe and what
he did was he advocates well it's in his
book here what's called euclidean
quantum gravity this is a pretty heavy
going book and I know that some of
Hawking students have to read this
before they do anything else they have
to read through the whole book Euclidean
the Euclidean bit of that means you go
to imaginary time so you get rid of in
real time and you go to an imaginary
time and describe physics like that and
what that does is you can have a
scenario where when you go back in
imaginary time the the universe just
closes off you have no boundary so
there's no initial point in time you
can't define that it just closes off
when you say imaginary time do you mean
like a time where there's Cinderella or
do you mean imaginary in terms of I and
number that doesn't exist Esther but it
doesn't exist yeah I mean the what in
terms of the imaginary number yet
exactly so you'd basically you go from
time as in real time to I times
you can have an entire process which
would happen instantaneously in real
time but actually when you go to
imaginary it's actually moving around in
imaginary time this process is happening
in imaginary time so that's where it's
going on and you can actually make
predictions that can be verified based
on all this little dynamics but in the
imaginary time plane if you like so if
you actually go to khat you get some
ideas you can even go to complex time
but you have a real component and
imaginary component I mean you can
really extend the notion of time in this
way one of the things that Hawking's
done recently where he's applied these
ideas of Euclidean quantum gravity to is
is to the acceleration of the universe
so we know that the universe is
expanding quicker and quicker today and
normally we attribute that to a positive
cosmological constant of positive energy
of the vacuum
now what Hawking is claiming is that
actually you can get the same effect but
from a negative cosmological constant
and negative energy of the vacuum now
that doesn't normally happen right
that's not what normally happens
negative cosmological constant behaves
very very differently typically the
universe would just crunch but he's
saying actually you can get this cosmic
acceleration out of it and that's really
weird
well I know that he does his
calculations in his head which I just
find is just astonishing
absolutely astonishing I mean I got
which there'll be a pile on here of just
there just calculations like this is a
15 page you know calculation you know he
toss down his head it's unbelievable
I just find it astonishing so so Hawking
obviously you know he's this this great
guy and and astonishing physicist but a
friend of mine was behind him in the q40
once and in Cambridge he's like almost
Stephen Hawking in front of me in the
queue that's pretty pretty cool isn't it
I wonder what he's going to say all
right you know thinking so Hawking get
to the front of the queue and he's he
sort of I was going to say something
yeah on it
and there and then he said M T please so
that was all a bit disappointing for her
so I don't know I expected some sort of
dramatic incited to you know the physics
of T or something that you just got T
please so it is a normal person as well
I think it's the point