Avi Loeb

And his mentor, his advisor was John Wheeler at Princeton.

He said, this is such a crazy idea that it may be right.

And Stephen Hawking heard him speak at a conference and he said, that's complete nonsense.

So he wanted to prove him wrong, Jacob Bekenstein's wrong, and worked on the problem and did a semi-classical calculation and showed that the vacuum near a black hole is indeed different from the vacuum far away so that there is thermal radiation coming out from the distorted space-time near the horizon of a black hole.

and basically demonstrated that Bekenstein was correct.

There is entropy there.

There is thermal radiation.

There is a temperature to black holes.

They radiate.

This is called Hawking temperature, Hawking radiation.

It's his biggest accomplishment that resulted from him trying to prove wrong Bekenstein.

And what this demonstrates is how in science, if you are confident enough

That something else is wrong Try and prove it And argue with it Because you might realize that you are wrong And that's the way good science is done

And actually Hawking got his fame out of this attempt to disprove Bekenstein.

And it's called the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.

If that entropy, so that's been proven that's there.

No, we didn't detect it, but we expect it to be there.

There are big issues because the radiation comes out as thermal radiation with very little information in it, just the temperature.

Because it's ignoring gravity, isn't it?

Well, the curvature of space-time is the origin of this radiation next to the horizon.