G.W. Gibbons and Stephen Hawking (1942-2018).

‘Action integrals and partition functions in quantum gravity.’ Offprint from: Physical Review D, Vol. 15, No. 10, pp.2752-2756. [Brookhaven, NY: The American Physical Society]. Provenance: the estate of the late Professor Stephen Hawking.

Hawking himself viewed this paper as one of his most significant in relation to his discovery that quantum mechanics would cause a black hole to emit thermal radiation with a temperature to the surface gravity (see Hawking on the Big Bang and Black Holes, Advanced Series in Astrophysics and Cosmology, Vol. 8 (1993), p.3). The paper evaluates the action for a gravitational field using a scheme that avoids singularities, and recovers the standard result that the entropy of black holes is equal to a quarter of the area of the event horizon.

Quarto (278 x 212mm). Stapled self-wrappers (punch holes).

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