Dark Star Rising: Bremont Launches The Supernova ‘Hawking’ Limited Edition

Doing a watch that pays tribute to the work of Stephen Hawking comes with challenges to put it mildly. Hawking’s work on black holes is famous, and famously difficult to understand, despite the effort he put into clarifying some of his research for popular audiences. In the preface to the late physicist’s bestseller, A Brief History of Time, he wrote that his publisher told him he would lose half his readers for every equation he put into the book; he admitted that he had put in just one: Einstein’s mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc², which he figured was familiar enough to not upset anyone.

Hawking passed away in 2018 at the age of 76; he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at the age of 21 and had been given two years to live. He outlived the prognosis by over half a century.

Black Hole Temperature And Entropy

Hawking’s most famous discovery was the so-called Hawking radiation, and it’s that discovery which Bremont honors in the latest limited edition (a previous homage to Stephen Hawking was also produced by Bremont in 2020). The watch is based on the Watches and Wonders Supernova, with an angular case 41mm x 14mm, and has the same dial motifs as well, which are meant to evoke the solar panels used to power spacecraft. The watch adds meteorite subdials to the original design, and, on the dial, Bremont’s placed the formula for the entropy of a black hole: S=kc³A/4ℏG.

The equation shows something that physicists thought shouldn’t exist. Black holes as extrapolated from Einstein’s theory of general relativity, consist of stars so massive that when they collapse, their mass is crushed into a point at which the density becomes infinite. This point of infinite density has a gravitational pull so strong that within a certain radius, the curvature of spacetime is so extreme that not even light can escape. This radius is the radius of the event horizon, and for decades, it was thought that black holes had only three properties: mass, spin, and charge.

Entropy And Information

A serious problem with this model has to do with entropy, which is the amount of disorder in a physical system. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy can only increase, never decrease – thus, the milk mixed into a coffee cup will never unmix itself. This is true of the entire universe, as well. If black holes had only three properties, throwing anything into a black hole would remove the entropy of the lost object, and thus decrease the total entropy of the rest of the universe, which is forbidden by the Second Law.

In the early 1970s, Jacob Bekenstein proposed that black holes must have entropy, which he said would be proportional to the surface area of the event horizon. Hawking was skeptical at first, but later realized that there was a mechanism by which black holes could radiate thermal energy. The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics shows that there is a non-zero chance of so-called virtual particle pairs appearing spontaneously. Normally, these particles annihilate instantly, but if such a pair appears close enough to a black hole, one of the pair may escape into space. To an observer, the black hole would appear to be radiating thermal energy, and while this decreases the entropy of the black hole, it increases the entropy of the universe, preserving the Second Law.

The fact that the entropy is proportional to the area of the event horizon, rather than its internal volume, seems counterintuitive but something even weirder comes out of it. There is a mathematical relationship between thermodynamic entropy, and information entropy, and so the formula also shows the maximum possible information content of a given region of space. Since this information content is proportional to the surface area of the event horizon rather than its volume, as is its entropy, Beckenstein proposed the “holographic principle” in which the three space dimensions familiar to us, are actually a projection from a two dimensional surface.

(Information as we understand it, usually has a physical substrate: a logic gate in a microprocessor; a letter on a printed page. In 2006 I was trying to understand where the information in a holographic universe “lived” physically, and I emailed Dr. Raphael Bousso at UC Berkely, who replied that currently, there was no answer to that question, but he sure would like to know because he and a lot of his fellow researchers felt that if they knew the answer, they’d understand quantum gravity).

This is a lot to take in, but hey, I didn’t put the formula on the dial, Bremont did. It’s an amazing little string of symbols, though, and as equations go, it may be the best way to remember Stephen Hawking and his work. The idea that black holes might have a temperature was approximately equivalent to proposing that under certain circumstances a dropped hammer might fall upwards, but here we are. And, of course, the use of meteoric iron for the subdials is apt as well – iron forms in the cores of supermassive stars, which end life as supernovas; it’s the accumulation of iron in a supermassive star which eventually causes it to collapse. If you’re going to make a watch related to black holes, “Supernova” is about as apt a name as there is.

Black holes don’t lend themselves to being incorporated into watch design motifs, but the link between black holes and the geometry of spacetime in the formula shown on the watch, speaks to the existence of physical regimes in the universe where the measurement of time itself becomes elastic.

The Bremont Supernova Hawking Limited Edition: Case, black DLC coated 904L stainless steel, black ceramic bezel ring, 41mm x 14mm; water resistance 100 meters. Black galvanic metal dial with meteorite subdials; hands, black gold hour and minute hands; sapphire crystal front and back. Movement, caliber BC77, chronograph running at 28,800 vph in 27 jewels, with 62 hour power reserve. Prices, $8,850 on a strap; $9,150 on a bracelet; 600 pieces world wide. 

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