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Stephen Hawking Receives Copley Medal
smooth wombat writes "Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, has been awarded the Royal Society's 275th Copley medal for his contribution to cosmology and theoretical physics. Other notables to receive the award, established by Stephen Gray in 1731 'For his new Electrical Experiments', include Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Albert Einstein. In his remarks, Professor Hawking reiterated his previous comments that man must colonize other planets. The medal presented to Professor Hawking was sent into space onboard Space Shuttle Discovery and spent some time on the International Space Station in July of this year. Hawking has expressed an interest in going into space and commented, 'My next goal is to go into space, maybe Richard Branson will help me.'"
In space, no one can hear your voice synthesizer...
Sorry, can't read "Stephen Hawking" anymore without hearing "...and all my shootings be drive-by's..." in my head. (You down with entropy? Yeah you know me.)
It's almost certainly a lifetime achievement, though not just for papers he wrote 30 years ago. Hawking is pretty active, as a quick look at the SPIRES index will show:
r awcmd=FIND+EA+HAWKING%2C+S+W&FORMAT=www&SEQUENCE=d s(d)
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/find/hep/www?
His most recent paper of interest is the 2005 paper on information loss in black holes, where he argues that information can in fact leak out of a black hole due to a quantum mechanical effect. The irony of this paper is that he made a public bet with another famous general relativity researcher 9 years ago that information which went into the black hole could never come out again. After publishing his paper, Hawking conceded the bet, though the paper is still somewhat controversial in the field.