Discovery
Hawking's discovery followed a visit to Moscow in 1973, where the Soviet scientists
Yakov Zel'dovich and
Alexei Starobinsky convinced him that
rotating black holes ought to create and emit particles, while Russian physicist
Vladimir Gribov believed that even a non-rotating black hole should emit radiation. When Hawking did the calculation, he found to his surprise that it was true.
[9] In 1972,
Jacob Bekenstein conjectured that the black holes should have an entropy,
[10] where by the same year, he proposed
no-hair theorems. Bekenstein's discovery and results are commended by
Stephen Hawking, which also led him to think about radiation due to this formalism.
According to the physicist
Dmitri Diakonov, there was an argument between Zeldovich and
Vladimir Gribov at the Zeldovich Moscow 1972–1973 seminar. Zeldovich believed that only a rotating black hole could emit radiation, while Gribov believed that even a non-rotating black hole emits radiation due to the laws of quantum mechanics.
[11][12] This account is confirmed by Gribov's obituary in the
Physics-Uspekhi by
Vitaly Ginzburg and others.
[13][14]