Stephen Hawking Never Answered His 'Most Interesting' Scientific Question

Stephen Hawking died today (March 14), leaving behind a massive legacy of work as an astrophysicist, science communicator, activist, and figure of pop culture admiration.Hawking's most famous paper, "Black Hole Explosions?," published 44 years ago in 1974, took a hatchet to the whole notion of black holes as physicists had previous understood them."Classically, a black hole should be 'perfectly cold' in the sense that it absorbs everything but emits nothing.