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ATLANTA, GA — Indian scientists are remembering physicist Stephen Hawking for his contributions that directly affected them in their careers, following the death of the legendary scientist on March 14.
A post-doctoral research fellow and astrophysicist at Georgia Institute of Technology, Karan Jani credits Hawking for putting him on the path towards becoming the scientist he is today, according to a Quartz report.
Jani, who was part of a global team that helped detect the existence of gravitational waves and among Forbes’s 30 under 30-Science list in 2017, said it was Hawking’s 1988 book, “A Brief History of Time,” that introduced him to a world of big ideas that nobody in his small town of Vadodara was talking about.
“One of the great things about Hawking was he broke that communication barrier between scientists and regular people. His book reached (a) small town of India. And ironically, no Indian scientists’ books had reached that market,” says Jani.
Jani has worked at the LIGO Livingston Observatory in the US and the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany, besides the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, where Hawking was a research director, the report noted.
Another scientist of Indian origin, Abhas Mitra, when speaking of Hawking said that he had determined in 2000 that ‘exact’ black holes as we thought of them could not exist as they would not follow the rules of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Instead, Mitra argued that all black holes would only be approximate or quasi black holes.
Hawking discovered that black holes emit electromagnetic radiation — which later became known as Hawking Radiation — and proved theoretically that they could eventually disappear for good.
Then, in 2014, he said there actually were no black holes at all, or at least not in the way we’d been taught to think about them. Hawking, it seemed, had solved the “black hole information paradox.”
He even went on to head BARC’s theoretical astrophysics department. And though his life’s work never brought him the kind of international renown that Hawking enjoyed, Mitra is also mourning the physicist’s recent death at the age of 76.
“Stephen Hawking has been a highly inspiring human being for all, including me, and his passing away is a great loss for physics,” he said in the report.