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Example research essay topic: Origin Of The Universe Stephen Hawking - 1,636 words

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A Profile of Stephen Hawking Many people imagine science as a compilation of facts and ideas regarding the world around them. However, science is much more than how human beings have brought their individual strengths and weaknesses to the continuing effort to learn more about the world. Stephen Hawking is one of the most renowned and most accepted scientists in the world nowadays. His life and works have been presented in various newspapers and magazine articles, TV documentaries, and even films. Sufficient part of Hawkings fame originates from his ability to use his imagination or instinct to see correlations between outwardly disparate ideas. He has merged the physical laws leading suns and galaxies with those leading the particles inside the atom.

He has shaped a chain of thought that connects events inside breaking up stars with the almost unthinkable detonation that, as the majority of scientists believe, began in our universe about fifteen billion years ago (Boslough). In 1942, Great Britain was in the third year of a sour struggle for existence. England had been secure from invasion, but night after night, German bombers went on to strike London. Frank and Isobel Hawking were expecting for their first child.

The Hawkings were well-educated and talented. Both had attended the university at Oxford. The couple realized that London was an unsafe place to raise a child, and decided to move to Oxford which Germany had agreed not to bomb in return for the British not bombing Heidelberg and Gottingen. Stephen Hawking once noted that he was born on January the 8 th, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo.

World War Two changed the way people looked at scientists and their theories. Suddenly the incomprehensible ideas of physics had become very important. The laws of gravity and motion, discovered centuries earlier by Sir Isaac Newton, now enabled warring nations to aim and launch rockets and new jet airplanes that would soon break the sound barrier. Science became a more important part of the school curriculum, especially after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the first artificial earth satellite, in 1957. Children of Hawkings generation had a greater opportunity than ever before to be exposed to the exciting and swiftly changing world of Science. Stephen did well enough in high school to be accepted at the prestigious Oxford University in 1959.

He loved the freedom that accompanied College, but had a hard time applying himself to his studies. Hawking later calculated that he had studied an average of only an hour a day during his three years at Oxford. Stephen wanted to go to graduate school at Cambridge, But to be accepted he would have to pass his finals with the highest possible honors. His test scores were borderline, and Hawking managed to talk his way into Cambridge and entered in 1962 (Boslough). One year later, Hawkings life took a drastic turn.

His coordination had been off for a while, and he noticed that he had a hard time controlling his hands and fell quite often. He went to his family doctor and after extensive tests, was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease. Hawking recalls: The realization that I had an incurable disease that was likely to kill me in a few years was a bit of a shock. How could something like that happen to me?

I was going to lose the use of my body. And they told me that eventually I would essentially have the body of a cabbage but my mind would still be in perfect working order, and I would be unable to communicate with the rest of the world. They said that at the end, only my heart, lungs, and mind would still be in working. After that, either my heart or lungs would give up. Then I will die. (Hawking) But something new was about to come into Hawkings life.

Once at Cambridge, Hawking was required to pick a subject to research for a doctoral degree. He decided on Cosmology, the study of the nature and origin of the universe. It focused on some fascinating questions about which new theories could be applied. How big was the universe?

Why was it growing bigger all the time? How did he universe begin? Would the universe die someday or go on existing forever? Besides questions of the origin of the universe, cosmology also offered Hawking another puzzle.

What happens to stars when they die? (Susskind) Hawking became fascinated by the idea of singularity. As a physical body, a singularity, or black hole, was expected to have some very strange properties (Hewitt). A black hole would still have most of the mass that it had when it was a full-sized star, but its surface would now be very close to the bodys center of mass (Susskind). As a result the surface would be immense -- so powerful, in fact, that anything that entered the black hole would be trapped inside, and nothing, not even light, could ever come out.

Put another was a black hole would bend space so completely around itself that it would, in effect, disappear into a private universe of its own (Susskind). In his book A Brief History of Time, Hawking gives his opinion of black holes. The best explanation for this phenomenon is that matter has been blown off the surface of the visible star. As it falls toward the unseen companion, it develops a spiral motion (rather like water running out of a bath), and it gets very hot, emitting X-rays. For this mechanism to work, the unseen object has to be very small, like a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. From the observed orbit of the visible star, one can determine the lowest possible mass of the unseen object.

In the case of Cygnus X- 1 [a likely candidate for a black hole is this star system], this is about six times the mass of the sun, which according to Chandrasekhars result, is too great... to be a white dwarf. It is also too large a mass to be a neutron star. It seems, therefore, that it must be a black hole... (Hawking) Hawking continued to make progress in following up his insights into black holes. Unfortunately, His condition was worsening and he began getting around in a wheelchair. The future seemed uncertain, and he and his wife, Jane, whom he married in 1965, felt they could lose no time in starting a family.

Their first child, Robert, was born in 1967. Robert was followed by a daughter, Lucy, in 1970, and another son, Timothy, in 1979 (Boslough). Hawking continued to work on black holes. He struggled with these problems. Then he had an important realization One evening, shortly after the birth of my daughter, Lucy, I started to think about black holes as I was getting into bed. My disability made this rather a slow process, so I had plenty of time.

Suddenly I realized that the area of the event horizon always increases with time. I was so excited with my discovery that I didnt get much sleep that night. (Hawking) Why was it important that the area covered by a black holes event horizon could only get bigger, never smaller? For one thing, it suggested for the first time that there was something about black holes that did change over time. Hawking then asked himself if this property of black holes was like anything else in the more familiar realms of physics. He found that there was a principle called entropy in the laws of thermodynamics that could be compared to the behavior of a black holes event horizon. Entropy is a measure of how disordered or disorganized something is (Boslough).

The principle of entropy expresses our common experience that everything tends to wear out, run down, or get jumbled over time. For example, even mountains that have stood for millions of years eventually erode or crumble away. In physics entropy usually refers to the amount of heat energy in a system (Susskind). At first the existence of black holes seemed to violate the idea that the entropy of the universe as a whole was always increasing. Since nothing can come out of a black hole, you have seemingly cheated the law of entropy. The amount of entropy in the universe would not, it seems, increase in this situation, because the inside of the black hole is sealed off from our ordinary universe.

Hawking also pointed out that a black hole, since it could not emit any form of radiation, could not have a temperature. Since entropy is measured by temperature, Hawking hypothesized that a black hole couldnt have entropy in any meaningful way (Hewitt). Thus far Hawking had been applying Einsteins theory of general relativity along with a bit of thermodynamics to black holes. Einsteins theory was one of the two powerful theories that had given twentieth-century physics the unprecedented ability to explain the behavior of matter and energy. The other breakthrough theory was that of quantum mechanics, first formulated in the 1920 s, which explained how things worked in the world within the atom -- a world of tiny particles, minuscule distance, and incredibly brief intervals of time. When Hawking began to apply the equations of quantum mechanics to black holes, the results startled and distressed him.

According to the equations black holes appeared to emit radiation, just as the Russian Physicist Zeldovich had suggested. This meant that a black hole had a temperature and, therefore, could have entropy. Hawking confirmed the results of the Soviet research and extended it to apply to all black holes, not just spinning ones (Susskind). Only a few weeks after announcing his discovery of the radiation (named Hawking Radiation after the discoverer), Stephen Hawking received an invitation to join the...


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Research essay sample on Origin Of The Universe Stephen Hawking

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