Stephen Hawking: We will have cleaner and cheaper power in 10 years

 
Predictions: Stephen Hawking at the Standard’s The 1000 power list launch (Picture: Dave Bennett)
Kiran Randhawa20 October 2014

Professor Stephen Hawking has predicted that major scientific discoveries will deliver cleaner and cheaper energy within the next decade.

In an interview with the Standard, the author and leading physicist said imminent scientific breakthroughs will also lead to faster and more efficient transport. Professor Hawking predicted there will be huge developments in the area of “high temperature superconductivity” in the next 10 years.

Super conductors allow the efficient transport of energy, so electricity will travel through power lines with minimal wastage, leading to cheaper energy bills. When super conductors are combined with magnetic fields, there could be further benefits to the way we live.

Because superconductors lose little energy, they can be used to create huge magnets which could, for example, make Maglev-style trains — which float above, rather than run on, rails — more efficient and able to go faster using less energy.

The 72-year-old, named by the Evening Standard last week as one of London’s most influential people, also predicted developments in the area of nuclear fusion — replicating what happens in the sun.

In the process of nuclear fusion, hydrogen atoms are fused to create helium to release vast amounts of energy. The environment benefits because there is no nuclear waste.

The Cambridge professor and best-selling author of A Brief History Of Time said: “High temperature superconductivity will provide cheap power transmission and rapid transport, and nuclear fusion would give us an unlimited supply of clean energy.”

He added the other “major scientific breakthrough” in the next few years will be “primordial gravitational waves” — the first tremors of the big bang.

The cosmologist said he is confident the minuscule ripples in space-time — the last prediction of Albert Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity — could be proved within the next few years and can tell us more about how the universe began.

“I think the major scientific breakthrough in the next few years will be primordial gravitational waves,” he said. “These come to us direct from the Big Bang, the origin of the universe, unlike light, which is scattered many times. They are a prediction of inflation, the theory that the universe expanded at an ever-increasing rate, like the way prices go up.

“They will tell us how the universe began and about physics at far higher energies than any particle accelerator we can build. There has been a claim to detect primordial gravitational waves but this is doubtful and remains to be confirmed.”

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