How did it all begin?  Is there a god? Can we pre­dict the future? Is there oth­er intel­li­gent life in the uni­verse? For decades, many of us turned to Stephen Hawk­ing for answers to those ques­tions, or at least supreme­ly intel­li­gent sug­ges­tions as to where the answers might lie. But the cel­e­brat­ed astro­physi­cist’s death ear­li­er this year — after an aston­ish­ing­ly long life and career, giv­en the chal­lenges he faced — took that option away. It turns out, though, that we haven’t actu­al­ly heard the last of him: his last book, Brief Answers to the Big Ques­tions (whose trail­er you can watch just above), came out just this week.

“The book is quin­tes­sen­tial Hawk­ing,” writes physics pro­fes­sor Marce­lo Gleis­er at NPR. “He starts by address­ing the ques­tions in physics and cos­mol­o­gy that he ded­i­cat­ed his intel­lec­tu­al life to answer, using easy-to-fol­low argu­ments and draw­ing from every­day images and thought exper­i­ments.” Hawk­ing’s answers to the big ques­tions fig­ure into his view of not just the world but all exis­tence: he believes, writes Gleis­er, “that human­i­ty’s evo­lu­tion­ary mis­sion is to spread through the galaxy as a sort of cos­mic gar­den­er, sow­ing life along the way. He believes, even if not with­out wor­ry, that we will devel­op a pos­i­tive rela­tion­ship with intel­li­gent machines and that, togeth­er, we will redesign the cur­rent fate of the world and of our species.”

In par­al­lel with his career as a pub­lic fig­ure and writer of pop­u­lar explana­to­ry books, which began with 1988’s A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Hawk­ing per­formed sci­en­tif­ic research on black holes. The Guardian’s sci­ence edi­tor Ian Sam­ple describes it as a “career-long effort to under­stand what hap­pens to infor­ma­tion when objects fall into black holes,” capped off by a posthu­mous­ly pub­lished paper titled “Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair.” “Toss an object into a black hole and the black hole’s tem­per­a­ture ought to change,” writes Sam­ple. “So too will a prop­er­ty called entropy, a mea­sure of an object’s inter­nal dis­or­der, which ris­es the hot­ter it gets.” In the paper Hawk­ing and his col­lab­o­ra­tors show that “a black hole’s entropy may be record­ed by pho­tons that sur­round the black hole’s event hori­zon, the point at which light can­not escape the intense grav­i­ta­tion­al pull. They call this sheen of pho­tons ‘soft hair’.”

If that sounds tricky to under­stand, all of us who have appre­ci­at­ed Hawk­ing’s writ­ing know that we can at least go back to his books to get a grip on black holes and the ques­tions about them that get sci­en­tists most curi­ous. Much remains for future astro­physi­cists to work on about that “infor­ma­tion para­dox,” to do with where, exact­ly, every­thing that seem­ing­ly gets sucked into a black hole actu­al­ly goes. “We don’t know that Hawk­ing entropy accounts for every­thing you could pos­si­bly throw at a black hole, so this is real­ly a step along the way,” Hawk­ing’s col­lab­o­ra­tor Mal­colm J. Per­ry tells Sam­ple. “We think it’s a pret­ty good step, but there is a lot more work to be done.” As Hawk­ing sure­ly knew, the big ques­tions — in physics or any oth­er realm of exis­tence — nev­er quite get ful­ly answered.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Hawk­ing (RIP) Explains His Rev­o­lu­tion­ary The­o­ry of Black Holes with the Help of Chalk­board Ani­ma­tions

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D. The­sis, “Prop­er­ties of Expand­ing Uni­vers­es,” Now Free to Read/Download Online

Watch A Brief His­to­ry of Time, Errol Mor­ris’ Film About the Life & Work of Stephen Hawk­ing

The Big Ideas of Stephen Hawk­ing Explained with Sim­ple Ani­ma­tion

Watch Stephen Hawking’s Inter­view with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Record­ed 10 Days Before His Death: A Last Con­ver­sa­tion about Black Holes, Time Trav­el & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Say you made a Nobel-wor­thy sci­en­tif­ic dis­cov­ery and the prize went to your the­sis super­vi­sor instead. How would you take it? Prob­a­bly not as well as Joce­lyn Bell Bur­nell, dis­cov­er­er of the first radio pul­sars, to whom that very thing hap­pened in 1974. “Demar­ca­tion dis­putes between super­vi­sor and stu­dent are always dif­fi­cult, prob­a­bly impos­si­ble to resolve,” she said a few years lat­er. “It is the super­vi­sor who has the final respon­si­bil­i­ty for the suc­cess or fail­ure of the project. We hear of cas­es where a super­vi­sor blames his stu­dent for a fail­ure, but we know that it is large­ly the fault of the super­vi­sor. It seems only fair to me that he should ben­e­fit from the suc­cess­es, too.”

But now, 44 years lat­er, Bell Bur­nel­l’s achieve­ment has brought a dif­fer­ent prize her way: the Spe­cial Break­through Prize in Fun­da­men­tal Physics, to be pre­cise, and the $3 mil­lion that comes with it, all of which she will donate “to fund women, under-rep­re­sent­ed eth­nic minor­i­ty and refugee stu­dents to become physics researchers.” “Like the stars of Hid­den Fig­ures and DNA researcher Ros­alind Franklin, Bell Burnell’s per­son­al sto­ry embod­ies the chal­lenges faced by women in sci­en­tif­ic fields,” write the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Sarah Kaplan and Anto­nia Noori Farzan. “Bell Bur­nell, who was born in North­ern Ire­land in 1943, had to fight to take sci­ence class­es after age 12.”

Reject­ing an expect­ed life of cook­ery and needle­work, Bell Bur­nell “read her father’s astron­o­my books cov­er to cov­er, teach­ing her­self the jar­gon and grap­pling with com­plex con­cepts until she felt she could com­pre­hend the uni­verse. She com­plained to her par­ents, who com­plained to the school, which ulti­mate­ly allowed her to attend lab along with two oth­er girls. At the end of the semes­ter, Bell Bur­nell ranked first in the class.” Still, by the time she arrived at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty for grad­u­ate school, she “was cer­tain some­one had made a mis­take admit­ting her.” Her sub­se­quent work there on one of “the most impor­tant astro­nom­i­cal finds of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” which you can see her talk about in the clip above, should have dis­pelled that notion.

But as Josh Jones wrote here on Open Cul­ture last month, Bell Bur­nell was a vic­tim of the “Matil­da effect,” named for suf­frag­ist and abo­li­tion­ist Matil­da Joslyn Gage, which iden­ti­fies the “denial of recog­ni­tion to women sci­en­tists” seen through­out the his­to­ry of sci­ence. The new gen­er­a­tion of prizes like the Break­through Prize in Fun­da­men­tal Physics, found­ed in 2012 by physi­cist-entre­pre­neur Yuri Mil­ner, have the poten­tial to coun­ter­act the Matil­da effect, but many oth­er Matil­das have yet to be rec­og­nized. “I am not myself upset about it,” as Bell Bur­nell put it in 1977 when asked about her non-recep­tion of the Nobel. “After all, I am in good com­pa­ny, am I not!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Read the “Don’t Let the Bas­tards Get You Down” Let­ter That Albert Ein­stein Sent to Marie Curie Dur­ing a Time of Per­son­al Cri­sis (1911)

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Pop Art Posters Cel­e­brate Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists: Down­load Free Posters of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.