Popular physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76
Stephen Hawking, who was regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Albert Einstein and had an improbable journey since being diagnosed with a motor neurone disease in 1963, has died, his family announced today.
He was 76. He is survived by his wife Jane, daughter Lucy, and two sons, Robert and Timothy.
Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of Motor Neurone Disease, shortly after his 21st birthday, and was given two years to live. He became wheelchair-bound and dependent on a computerised voice system for communication. But he did not allow all this to affect him and continued with his research into theoretical physics. He wrote several books that became immensely popular, travelled extensively for lectures and other engagements and had hoped to make it into space one day.
The announcement said Hawking passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home in Cambridge in England.
"We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today," his family said in a statement.
"He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years," it said.
"His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humor inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him forever,” it said.
Hawking, who overcame his disease to become a brilliant researcher and one of the best known scientists in the world, wrote several influential books, including "A Brief History of Time", which is an international bestseller.
He served as Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. From 1979 to 2009 he held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663.
He had more than a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Science.
Later, Hawking served as the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge.
His other books for general readers include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe and The Universe in a Nutshell.
Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. When he was eight his family moved to St. Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St. Albans School and then on to University College, Oxford (1952); his father's old college. Stephen wanted to study mathematics although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he pursued physics instead. After three years, he was awarded a first class honours degree in natural science.
In October 1962, Stephen arrived at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge to do research in cosmology. After gaining his PhD (1965) with his thesis titled 'Properties of Expanding Universes', he became, first, a research fellow (1965), then Fellow for Distinction in Science (1969) at Gonville & Caius college. In 1966 he won the Adams Prize for his essay 'Singularities and the Geometry of Space-time'. Stephen moved to the Institute of Astronomy (1968), later moving back to DAMTP (1973), employed as a research assistant, and published his first academic book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, with George Ellis.
Hawking worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's general theory of relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes (1970). These results indicated that it was necessary to unify general relativity with quantum theory, the other great scientific development of the first half of the 20th century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit 'Hawking' radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear (1974).
Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science. Later, Hawking worked with colleagues on a possible resolution to the black hole information paradox, where debate centres around the conservation of information.
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