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The Royal Mint of the United Kingdom will honor Stephen Hawking's work with a commemorative coin featuring the physicist's name over concentric circles representing a black hole. It looks awesome.
The famous scientist died last year and is perhaps best known to the scientific community for his studies on black holes and his idea that black holes can evaporate via "Hawking radiation". A brief history of time, his various appearances in pop culture and his ability to thrive despite the paralyzing effects of his motor neuron disease.
Edwina Ellis designed the piece, reports the BBC. It is not only surprising that a conceptual drawing of a black hole appears on a coin, but I bet it is the most advanced physics equation ever on a currency.
This equation describes the entropy of a black hole. Entropy can be understood as the number of different microscopic configurations that might add to the macroscopic qualities you observe, or how the energy of a system disperses at a given temperature. It's interesting to ask for the entropy of a black hole, because we know that even light can not escape a black hole; But at the same time, the laws of physics say that the entropy of a system can not spontaneously diminish. So, in the early 1970s, physicists like Hawking started asking what had happened to the total entropy of the system when things were falling into black holes.
Hawking's work led to the idea of Hawking's radiation, to the theory that black holes must emit matter from their surface, also called the horizon of events. The idea represents an important milestone in physics and the equation is an important combination of the laws of gravity, called general relativity, and laws of the smaller particles, called quantum mechanics.
Undistributed copies of the coin are available for purchase on the Royal Mint's website.
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