Demons in Black Hole Thermodynamics: Bekenstein and Hawking

Abstract: This paper comprehensively explores Stephen Hawking's interaction with Jacob Bekenstein. Both Hawking and Bekenstein benefited from the interaction with each other. It is shown that Hawking's interaction with Bekenstein drove him to solve the problems in Bekenstein's black hole thermodynamics in terms of a new thermal radiation mechanism. Hawking derived the thermal radiation using a semiclassical approximation in which the matter fields are treated quantum mechanically on a classical spacetime background. Hawking's semiclassical approximation yielded a simple formula for the entropy of the black hole, which turned out to be equivalent to Bekenstein's equation for entropy.