HAWKING, Stephen (his copy); GIBBONS, G.W., Euclidean Quantum Gravity (World Scientific Publishing, Singapore), 1993

180x255mm; pp. xiii, 586.

As a collection, this volume counts as one of the milestones of 20th century astrophysics. The book collects some 37 papers by Hawking and others, inlucing the classic ‘Particle Creation by Black Holes’, considered to be “perhaps the most important paper on quantum gravity” (Maciej Przanowski, reviewing this volume).

In the ‘Particle Creation’, first published in 1975 in Communications in Mathematical Physics, Hawking gave a detailed account of what has come to be known as ‘Hawking Radiation’, the counter-intuitive notion that black holes ‘evaporate’ gradually through thermal black-body radiation escaping the event horizon.

Roger Penrose’s words sum up the importance of the work presented here: “We remember Newton for answers. We remember Hawking for questions. And Hawking’s questions themselves keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later. When ultimately we master the quantum gravity laws, and fully comprehend the birth of our universe, it will be by standing on the shoulders of Hawking.”

Also included are Hawking's papers ‘The Cosmological Constant is Probably Zero’, and ‘Wormholes in Spacetime’, as well as a number of important papers by other authors, notable Shing-Tung Yau and Richard M. Schoen’s ‘Proof of the Positive-Action Conjecture in Quantum Gravity’.

A highly significant volume with unsurpassable provenance: this is Hawking's own file copy (the only copy we have been able to identify as such).

As with almost all of Hawking’s books, provenance is via the Cambridge bookshop that handled Hawking's personal library and is indicated by a custom bookplate.