That gravity is a product of a time gradient, without spatial distortion. And what’s more — the presence of the variable “time” in practically all formulas of physics probably means that all other “forces” are also derivatives of time. And the speed of light is a speedometer for the speed of time, not an independent physical constant. Could this be the “great unification”?

Hawking radiation causes black holes to eventually evaporate. This is because particle pairs are spontaneously created near the event horizon (the position of the last ray of light that can escape the black hole’s gravitational pull). A particle and its antiparticle are created for a brief moment and disappear immediately afterward. But sometimes a particle falls into the black hole, allowing the other particle to escape: This is Hawking radiation. According to Stephen Hawking, this would ultimately mean that no black holes would remain in the universe.

Astronomer Heino Falcke, physicist Michael Wondrak and mathematician Walter van Suijlekom from Radboud University had previously demonstrated that the event horizon plays a subordinate role in the origin of the radiation. In an article published in Communications in Mathematical Physics, they have now also provided mathematical proof for a similar problem.

Van Suijlekom said, “We wanted to formulate a mathematically rigorous model as precisely as possible. We wanted hard mathematical proof in the case that only a temporal horizon exists and that the universe ultimately resembles its initial state.”