BBC Science Focus Magazine – March 2026 – BBC Science Focus Magazine (1)

Stephen Hawking spent much of his life pulling at a thread, one that had been swallowed by a black hole. He was interested in what happened to material once it passed a black hole’s event horizon – the point of no return, where gravity crushes anything that crosses it into an infinitesimally small point in space. If you fell in, your atoms would become part of this cosmic monster and reside there until the end of time. Hawking’s maths suggested something else, though.

According to his calculations, black holes don’t last until the end of time. In fact, our latest interpretation of the Universe, based on quantum mechanics, suggests that over time a black hole would… fizz away: its particles evaporating off over eons until one final, massive burst of energy.

Why does this matter? Well, until this point, the prevailing idea in physics was that nothing is ever really destroyed. If we could somehow fish your atoms out of a black hole, and invent a machine that knew where to put them, we could, in theory, rebuild you.

The death of a black hole, and the ultimate end of everything within it, seemed to violate this rule. Hawking had spotted a crack in our model of the Universe. The resolution to this problem that he settled on, after many intellectual battles with other theoretical physicists, was the ‘holographic principle’ (an idea first proposed by physicists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind). It’s a headscratcher of an idea that suggests the Universe is actually a projection – a 3D reality derived from 2D information.

And, that’s where I’ll stop and let Thomas Hertog take over, on p64. Hertog was one of Hawking’s closest science collaborators and he thinks that we’re close to a discovery that will let us see Hawking’s maths play out in the real world. A discovery that could finally move us closer to a single, unified theory of everything. Daniel Bennett, Editor O N T H E B B C T H I S M O N T H .

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Book Information

• Unique ID: 49b288dcf5c116d6
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 159,191,014 bytes (151.816 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 93
• Language: English (en)

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