Scientists / Open questions

Stephen W. Hawking

Cosmology; black holes; quantum gravity

15 questions

Late-time fate and beyond-leading-order robustness of the (anti-)evaporation instability of nearly-Nariai Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes
Can soft horizon hair account for black hole entropy and resolve the information paradox? The holographic plate, its capacity, and its quantum completion
The causal fate of apparent horizons: the surviving open core of the Gibbons–Hawking–Horowitz–Perry positive mass theorems for black holes
Survival of black holes pair-created during inflation: the initial nondegeneracy distribution and quantum-corrected evolution
Canonical realization of superrotation charges in asymptotically flat gravity and the one-loop fate of the antipodal matching conditions
Completing the horizon-Virasoro (soft hair) derivation of generic Kerr black hole entropy: first-principles Wald-Zoupas counterterm, integrable charge algebra, and quantum realization
Do baby universes and α-parameters exist in a complete theory of quantum gravity? The open status of Hawking's baby-universe framework
Robustness of the no-boundary predictions for inflation and cosmic isotropy beyond the Hawking–Luttrell minisuperspace treatment
Supersymmetric extension, twistor representation, and physical realization of the conformal BMS group
De Sitter entropy as entanglement entropy in a UV-complete induced-gravity brane-world (the Hawking–Maldacena–Strominger completion)
Self-consistent spacetime metric for large-N black hole collapse and evaporation: the coupled four-dimensional semiclassical and five-dimensional holographic Einstein problem, from AdS regularization to the asymptotically flat limit
Black hole pair creation in de Sitter space beyond leading semiclassical order: constrained instantons, prefactors, and spherical dominance
Completing the Bousso–Hawking analysis of nucleated primordial black holes in de Sitter space: the explicit Lorentzian-conjugate slicing for the constrained instanton
The end-point of black-hole evaporation and the fate of information beyond the semiclassical regime (the open question left by Hawking's 1975 'Particle creation by black holes')
Back reaction and quantum metric fluctuations in black hole evaporation: the unresolved caveat of Hawking's 'Black hole explosions?'

Back to open problems

Late-time fate and beyond-leading-order robustness of the (anti-)evaporation instability of nearly-Nariai Schwarzschild-de Sitter black holes

Can soft horizon hair account for black hole entropy and resolve the information paradox? The holographic plate, its capacity, and its quantum completion

The causal fate of apparent horizons: the surviving open core of the Gibbons–Hawking–Horowitz–Perry positive mass theorems for black holes

Survival of black holes pair-created during inflation: the initial nondegeneracy distribution and quantum-corrected evolution

Canonical realization of superrotation charges in asymptotically flat gravity and the one-loop fate of the antipodal matching conditions

Completing the horizon-Virasoro (soft hair) derivation of generic Kerr black hole entropy: first-principles Wald-Zoupas counterterm, integrable charge algebra, and quantum realization

Do baby universes and α-parameters exist in a complete theory of quantum gravity? The open status of Hawking's baby-universe framework

Robustness of the no-boundary predictions for inflation and cosmic isotropy beyond the Hawking–Luttrell minisuperspace treatment

Supersymmetric extension, twistor representation, and physical realization of the conformal BMS group

De Sitter entropy as entanglement entropy in a UV-complete induced-gravity brane-world (the Hawking–Maldacena–Strominger completion)

Self-consistent spacetime metric for large-N black hole collapse and evaporation: the coupled four-dimensional semiclassical and five-dimensional holographic Einstein problem, from AdS regularization to the asymptotically flat limit

Black hole pair creation in de Sitter space beyond leading semiclassical order: constrained instantons, prefactors, and spherical dominance

Completing the Bousso–Hawking analysis of nucleated primordial black holes in de Sitter space: the explicit Lorentzian-conjugate slicing for the constrained instanton

The end-point of black-hole evaporation and the fate of information beyond the semiclassical regime (the open question left by Hawking's 1975 'Particle creation by black holes')

Back reaction and quantum metric fluctuations in black hole evaporation: the unresolved caveat of Hawking's 'Black hole explosions?'