Don Page (physicist)

Work

Page's work focuses on quantum cosmology and theoretical gravitational physics, and he is noted for being a doctoral student of Stephen Hawking, who was at Caltech during 1974-1975, in addition to publishing several journal articles with him. Page got his BA at William Jewell College in the United States in 1971, attaining an MS in 1972 and a PhD in 1976 at Caltech.

His professional career started as a research assistant in Cambridge from 1976-1979, followed by an assistant professorship at Penn State from 1979-1983, and then an associate professor at Penn State until 1986 before taking on the title of professor in 1986. Page spent four more years at Penn State before moving to become a professor at the University of Alberta in Canada in 1990.

In 1993, he argued that if a black hole starts in a pure quantum state and evaporates completely by a unitary process, the von Neumann entropy of the Hawking radiation initially increases and then decreases back to zero when the black hole has disappeared. This is known as the Page curve, and the turnover point of the curve the Page time. For many researchers, deriving the Page curve is synonymous with solving the famous black hole information paradox.