STUDENT: Aryan Patel

PROJECT ADVISOR: Asif ud-Doula

ABSTRACT

The Theory of Everything is a concept scientists have been working towards for years. Hawking Radiation and the theory of how it forms provides hope that this theory can be proven by looking at the event horizon of a black hole, an astronomical object where gravity is so strong that even light cannot escape from it. Because nothing can escape the black hole, this conflicts with the Second Law of Thermodynamics which states that final entropy, a measure of order in a system, must be greater than initial entropy. Jacob Bekenstein proposed that the size of the event horizon is proportional to the mass of the black hole. This means that if a black hole gains mass, its event horizon will expand, increasing its entropy and obeying the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Stephen Hawking built on this theory and realized that black holes can also decay, furthering entropy. This decay is theorized to occur from the creation of a positive energy particle and a negative energy particle through quantum fluctuations. If these pairs of particles are formed at the edge of an event horizon, there is a possibility that the antiparticle will enter the event horizon and combine with a particle inside the black hole and annihilate it, decreasing the mass of the black hole. The positive energy particle will wander off into space as Hawking Radiation. Here, we show that this theory unifies Quantum Mechanics and The Theory of Relativity and gives Hawking Radiation a plausible origin.