Hawking on the Big Bang and Black Holes

by Hawking, Stephen W.

• ISBN13: 9789810210786
• ISBN10: 9810210787
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1993-09-01
• Publisher: World Scientific Pub Co Inc

Summary

Stephen Hawking, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, has made important theoretical contributions to gravitational theory and has played a major role in the development of cosmology and black hole physics.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology	p. 7
The Event Horizon	p. 27
The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics	p. 75
Particle Creation by Black Holes	p. 85
Action Integrals and Partition Functions in Quantum Gravity	p. 107
Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse	p. 112
Evaporation of Two-Dimensional Black Holes	p. 126
Cosmological Event Horizons, Thermodynamics, and Particle Creation	p. 130
The Development of Irregularities in a Single Bubble Inflationary Universe	p. 144
Zeta Function Regularization of Path Integrals in Curved Spacetime	p. 147
The Path-Integral Approach to Quantum Gravity	p. 163
Wave Function of the Universe	p. 207
Quantum Cosmology	p. 223
Origin of Structure in the Universe	p. 244
Arrow of Time in Cosmology	p. 259
The No-Boundary Proposal and the Arrow of Time	p. 266
The Cosmological Constant is Probably Zero	p. 276
Wormholes in Spacetime	p. 278
Do Wormholes Fix the Constants of Nature?	p. 285
Selection Rules for Topology Change	p. 296
Chronology Protection Conjecture	p. 304
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