The UK’s Royal Mint, the Royal Mint, has released a commemorative coin honoring the late physicist Stephen Hawking, featuring one of his favorite subjects: black holes.
The new 50 pence coin features Hawking’s name in a field of concentric, circular lines representing a black hole. Cleverly, the surface of the coin appears to drift inward at the center of the black hole (but it is actually a 2D image). The design is definitely fabulous.
With an equation
Also included in the coin is one of the Hawking signature theorems: S = (k * A * c ^ 3) / (4 * hbar * G), also known as the Bekenstein-Hawking equation. (In this equation, S is entropy, k is Boltzmann’s constant, A is the surface area of the black hole, c is the speed of light, hbar is Planck’s constant, and G is Newton’s gravitational constant.)
Hawking and fellow physicist Jacob Bekenstein developed this equation to describe how the entropy of black holes, essentially their internal randomness and disorder, is related to the surface area of the black hole’s event horizon. When an object falls into a black hole, its entropy increases.
This equation helped lead Hawking to one of his most famous discoveries: the idea that even when black holes suck in large amounts of matter, they also slowly radiate small particles back into space, a phenomenon now known as Hawking radiation.
Do you want to get one?
The new Hawking coin will not absorb you in an inescapable singularity, but it will delight any collector or follower of the well-known physicist. You can request one on the Royal Mint website for 10 pounds (about 12 euros) plus shipping costs . Apparently, the coins will be shipped at the end of April to all buyers.
It is a purely decorative coin and not one that will later appear on the market, according to the Mint. Meanwhile, that’s why they have prepared limited editions in silver and gold that, curiously, have already been sold out. We can only buy the cheapest version.
In addition to the commemorative coin, the United Kingdom has shown interest in locating the face of one of its most famous scientists on the Bank of England’s 50-pound note (about 59 euros). At the moment it is unknown who will illustrate this banknote, but among the favorites are Stephen Hawking himself, the naturalist Charles Darwin, the physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton and a single woman: Rosalind Franklin, the discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA. .
Hawking died at age 76 on March 14, 2018, which coincides with Pi Day, the birth of scientist Albert Einstein, and the passing of revolutionary German economist and communist Karl Marx.
