biography sketch of stephen hawking

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was a scientist known for his work with black holes and relativity, and the author of popular science books like 'A Brief History of Time.'

(1942-2018)

Who Was Stephen Hawking?

Stephen Hawking was a British scientist, professor and author who performed groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology, and whose books helped to make science accessible to everyone.

Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. His birthday was also the 300th anniversary of the death of Galileo — long a source of pride for the noted physicist.

The eldest of Frank and Isobel Hawking's four children, Hawking was born into a family of thinkers.

His Scottish mother earned her way into Oxford University in the 1930s — a time when few women were able to go to college. His father, another Oxford graduate, was a respected medical researcher with a specialty in tropical diseases.

Hawking's birth came at an inopportune time for his parents, who didn't have much money. The political climate was also tense, as England was dealing with World War II and the onslaught of German bombs in London, where the couple was living as Frank Hawking undertook research in medicine.

In an effort to seek a safer place, Isobel returned to Oxford to have the couple's first child. The Hawkings would go on to have two other children, Mary and Philippa. And their second son, Edward, was adopted in 1956.

The Hawkings, as one close family friend described them, were an "eccentric" bunch. Dinner was often eaten in silence, each of the Hawkings intently reading a book. The family car was an old London taxi, and their home in St. Albans was a three-story fixer-upper that never quite got fixed. The Hawkings also housed bees in the basement and produced fireworks in the greenhouse.

In 1950, Hawking's father took work to manage the Division of Parasitology at the National Institute of Medical Research, and spent the winter months in Africa doing research. He wanted his eldest child to go into medicine, but at an early age, Hawking showed a passion for science and the sky.

That was evident to his mother, who, along with her children, often stretched out in the backyard on summer evenings to stare up at the stars. "Stephen always had a strong sense of wonder," she remembered. "And I could see that the stars would draw him."

Hawking was also frequently on the go. With his sister Mary, Hawking, who loved to climb, devised different entry routes into the family home. He loved to dance and also took an interest in rowing, becoming a team coxswain in college.

Early in his academic life, Hawking, while recognized as bright, was not an exceptional student. During his first year at St. Albans School , he was third from the bottom of his class.

But Hawking focused on pursuits outside of school; he loved board games, and he and a few close friends created new games of their own. During his teens, Hawking, along with several friends, constructed a computer out of recycled parts for solving rudimentary mathematical equations.

Hawking entered University College at the University of Oxford at the age of 17. Although he expressed a desire to study mathematics, Oxford didn't offer a degree in that specialty, so Hawking gravitated toward physics and, more specifically, cosmology.

By his own account, Hawking didn't put much time into his studies. He would later calculate that he averaged about an hour a day focusing on school. And yet he didn't really have to do much more than that. In 1962, he graduated with honors in natural science and went on to attend Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge for a Ph.D. in cosmology.

In 1968, Hawking became a member of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. The next few years were a fruitful time for Hawking and his research. In 1973, he published his first, highly-technical book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , with G.F.R. Ellis.

In 1979, Hawking found himself back at the University of Cambridge, where he was named to one of teaching's most renowned posts, dating back to 1663: the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.

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Wife and Children

At a New Year's party in 1963, Hawking met a young languages undergraduate named Jane Wilde. They were married in 1965. The couple gave birth to a son, Robert, in 1967, and a daughter, Lucy, in 1970. A third child, Timothy, arrived in 1979.

In 1990, Hawking left his wife Jane for one of his nurses, Elaine Mason. The two were married in 1995. The marriage put a strain on Hawking's relationship with his own children, who claimed Elaine closed off their father from them.

In 2003, nurses looking after Hawking reported their suspicions to police that Elaine was physically abusing her husband. Hawking denied the allegations, and the police investigation was called off. In 2006, Hawking and Elaine filed for divorce.

In the following years, the physicist reportedly grew closer to his family. He reconciled with Jane, who had remarried. And he published five science-themed novels for children with his daughter, Lucy.

Stephen Hawking: Books

Over the years, Hawking wrote or co-wrote a total of 15 books. A few of the most noteworthy include:

'A Brief History of Time'

In 1988 Hawking catapulted to international prominence with the publication of A Brief History of Time . The short, informative book became an account of cosmology for the masses and offered an overview of space and time, the existence of God and the future.

The work was an instant success, spending more than four years atop the London Sunday Times' best-seller list. Since its publication, it has sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages.

‘The Universe in a Nutshell’

A Brief History of Time also wasn't as easy to understand as some had hoped. So in 2001, Hawking followed up his book with The Universe in a Nutshell , which offered a more illustrated guide to cosmology's big theories.

‘A Briefer History of Time’

In 2005, Hawking authored the even more accessible A Briefer History of Time , which further simplified the original work's core concepts and touched upon the newest developments in the field like string theory.

Together these three books, along with Hawking's own research and papers, articulated the physicist's personal search for science's Holy Grail: a single unifying theory that can combine cosmology (the study of the big) with quantum mechanics (the study of the small) to explain how the universe began.

This kind of ambitious thinking allowed Hawking, who claimed he could think in 11 dimensions, to lay out some big possibilities for humankind. He was convinced that time travel is possible, and that humans may indeed colonize other planets in the future.

‘The Grand Design’

In September 2010, Hawking spoke against the idea that God could have created the universe in his book The Grand Design . Hawking previously argued that belief in a creator could be compatible with modern scientific theories.

In this work, however, he concluded that the Big Bang was the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and nothing more. "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing," Hawking said. "Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."

The Grand Design was Hawking's first major publication in almost a decade. Within his new work, Hawking set out to challenge Isaac Newton 's belief that the universe had to have been designed by God, simply because it could not have been born from chaos. "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going," Hawking said.

At the age of 21, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig 's disease). In a very simple sense, the nerves that controlled his muscles were shutting down. At the time, doctors gave him two and a half years to live.

Hawking first began to notice problems with his physical health while he was at Oxford — on occasion he would trip and fall, or slur his speech — but he didn't look into the problem until 1963, during his first year at Cambridge. For the most part, Hawking had kept these symptoms to himself.

But when his father took notice of the condition, he took Hawking to see a doctor. For the next two weeks, the 21-year-old college student made his home at a medical clinic, where he underwent a series of tests.

"They took a muscle sample from my arm, stuck electrodes into me, and injected some radio-opaque fluid into my spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays, as they tilted the bed," he once said. "After all that, they didn't tell me what I had, except that it was not multiple sclerosis, and that I was an atypical case."

Eventually, however, doctors did diagnose Hawking with the early stages of ALS. It was devastating news for him and his family, but a few events prevented him from becoming completely despondent.

The first of these came while Hawking was still in the hospital. There, he shared a room with a boy suffering from leukemia. Relative to what his roommate was going through, Hawking later reflected, his situation seemed more tolerable.

Not long after he was released from the hospital, Hawking had a dream that he was going to be executed. He said this dream made him realize that there were still things to do with his life.

In a sense, Hawking's disease helped turn him into the noted scientist he became. Before the diagnosis, Hawking hadn't always focused on his studies. "Before my condition was diagnosed, I had been very bored with life," he said. "There had not seemed to be anything worth doing."

With the sudden realization that he might not even live long enough to earn his Ph.D., Hawking poured himself into his work and research.

As physical control over his body diminished (he'd be forced to use a wheelchair by 1969), the effects of his disease started to slow down. Over time, however, Hawking's ever-expanding career was accompanied by an ever-worsening physical state.

How Did Stephen Hawking Talk?

By the mid-1970s, the Hawking family had taken in one of Hawking's graduate students to help manage his care and work. He could still feed himself and get out of bed, but virtually everything else required assistance.

In addition, his speech had become increasingly slurred, so that only those who knew him well could understand him. In 1985 he lost his voice for good following a tracheotomy. The resulting situation required 24-hour nursing care for the acclaimed physicist.

It also put in peril Hawking's ability to do his work. The predicament caught the attention of a California computer programmer, who had developed a speaking program that could be directed by head or eye movement. The invention allowed Hawking to select words on a computer screen that were then passed through a speech synthesizer.

At the time of its introduction, Hawking, who still had use of his fingers, selected his words with a handheld clicker. Eventually, with virtually all control of his body gone, Hawking directed the program through a cheek muscle attached to a sensor.

Through the program, and the help of assistants, Hawking continued to write at a prolific rate. His work included numerous scientific papers, of course, but also information for the non-scientific community.

Hawking's health remained a constant concern—a worry that was heightened in 2009 when he failed to appear at a conference in Arizona because of a chest infection. In April, Hawking, who had already announced he was retiring after 30 years from the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was rushed to the hospital for being what university officials described as "gravely ill," though he later made a full recovery.

Research on the Universe and Black Holes

In 1974, Hawking's research turned him into a celebrity within the scientific world when he showed that black holes aren't the information vacuums that scientists had thought they were.

In simple terms, Hawking demonstrated that matter, in the form of radiation, can escape the gravitational force of a collapsed star. Another young cosmologist, Roger Penrose, had earlier discovered groundbreaking findings about the fate of stars and the creation of black holes, which tapped into Hawking's own fascination with how the universe began.

The pair then began working together to expand upon Penrose’s earlier work, setting Hawking on a career course marked by awards, notoriety and distinguished titles that reshaped the way the world thinks about black holes and the universe.

When Hawking’s radiation theory was born, the announcement sent shock waves of excitement through the scientific world. Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 32, and later earned the prestigious Albert Einstein Award, among other honors. He also earned teaching stints at Caltech in Pasadena, California, where he served as visiting professor, and at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge.

In August 2015, Hawking appeared at a conference in Sweden to discuss new theories about black holes and the vexing "information paradox." Addressing the issue of what becomes of an object that enters a black hole, Hawking proposed that information about the physical state of the object is stored in 2D form within an outer boundary known as the "event horizon." Noting that black holes "are not the eternal prisons they were once thought," he left open the possibility that the information could be released into another universe.

Beginning of the Universe

In a March 2018 interview on Neil deGrasse Tyson 's Star Talk , Hawking addressed the topic of "what was around before the Big Bang" by stating there was nothing around. He said by applying a Euclidean approach to quantum gravity, which replaces real time with imaginary time, the history of the universe becomes like a four-dimensional curved surface, with no boundary.

He suggested picturing this reality by thinking of imaginary time and real time as beginning at the Earth's South Pole, a point of space-time where the normal laws of physics hold; as there is nothing "south" of the South Pole, there was also nothing before the Big Bang.

Hawking and Space Travel

In 2007, at the age of 65, Hawking made an important step toward space travel. While visiting the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, he was given the opportunity to experience an environment without gravity.

Over the course of two hours over the Atlantic, Hawking, a passenger on a modified Boeing 727, was freed from his wheelchair to experience bursts of weightlessness. Pictures of the freely floating physicist splashed across newspapers around the globe.

"The zero-G part was wonderful, and the high-G part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!" he said.

Hawking was scheduled to fly to the edge of space as one of Sir Richard Branson 's pioneer space tourists. He said in a 2007 statement, "Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global warming , nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space."

Stephen Hawking Movie and TV Appearances

If there is such a thing as a rock-star scientist, Hawking embodied it. His forays into popular culture included guest appearances on The Simpsons , Star Trek: The Next Generation , a comedy spoof with comedian Jim Carrey on Late Night with Conan O'Brien , and even a recorded voice-over on the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking."

In 1992, Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris released a documentary about Hawking's life, aptly titled A Brief History of Time . Other TV and movie appearances included:

'The Big Bang Theory'

In 2012, Hawking showed off his humorous side on American television, making a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory . Playing himself on this popular comedy about a group of young, geeky scientists, Hawking brings the theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper ( Jim Parsons ) back to Earth after finding an error in his work. Hawking earned kudos for this light-hearted effort.

'The Theory of Everything'

In November of 2014, a film about the life of Hawking and Jane Wilde was released. The Theory of Everything stars Eddie Redmayne as Hawking and encompasses his early life and school days, his courtship and marriage to Wilde, the progression of his crippling disease and his scientific triumphs.

In May 2016, Hawking hosted and narrated Genius , a six-part television series which enlists volunteers to tackle scientific questions that have been asked throughout history. In a statement regarding his series, Hawking said Genius is “a project that furthers my lifelong aim to bring science to the public. It’s a fun show that tries to find out if ordinary people are smart enough to think like the greatest minds who ever lived. Being an optimist, I think they will.”

In 2011, Hawkings had participated in a trial of a new headband-styled device called the iBrain. The device is designed to "read" the wearer's thoughts by picking up "waves of electrical brain signals," which are then interpreted by a special algorithm, according to an article in The New York Times . This device could be a revolutionary aid to people with ALS.

Hawking on AI

In 2014, Hawking, among other top scientists, spoke out about the possible dangers of artificial intelligence, or AI, calling for more research to be done on all of possible ramifications of AI. Their comments were inspired by the Johnny Depp film Transcendence , which features a clash between humanity and technology.

"Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history," the scientists wrote. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." The group warned of a time when this technology would be "outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand."

Hawking reiterated this stance while speaking at a technology conference in Lisbon, Portugal, in November 2017. Noting how AI could potentially make gains in wiping out poverty and disease, but could also lead to such theoretically destructive actions as the development of autonomous weapons, he said, "We cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it."

Hawking and Aliens

In July 2015, Hawking held a news conference in London to announce the launch of a project called Breakthrough Listen. Funded by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner, Breakthrough Listen was created to devote more resources to the discovery of extraterrestrial life.

Breaking the Internet

In October 2017, Cambridge University posted Hawking's 1965 doctoral thesis, "Properties of Expanding Universes," to its website. An overwhelming demand for access promptly crashed the university server, though the document still fielded a staggering 60,000 views before the end of its first day online.

When Did Stephen Hawking Die?

On March 14, 2018, Hawking finally died of ALS, the disease that was supposed to have killed him more than 50 years earlier. A family spokesman confirmed that the iconic scientist died at his home in Cambridge, England.

The news touched many in his field and beyond. Fellow theoretical physicist and author Lawrence Krauss tweeted: "A star just went out in the cosmos. We have lost an amazing human being. Hawking fought and tamed the cosmos bravely for 76 years and taught us all something important about what it truly means to celebrate about being human."

Hawking's children followed with a statement: "We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. 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."

Later in the month, it was announced that Hawking's ashes would be interred at Westminster Abbey in London, alongside other scientific luminaries like Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin .

On May 2, 2018, his final paper, titled "A smooth exit from eternal inflation?" was published in the Journal of High Energy Physics . Submitted 10 days before his death, the new report, co-authored by Belgian physicist Thomas Hertog, disputes the idea that the universe will continue to expand.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Stephen Hawking
• Birth Year: 1942
• Birth date: January 8, 1942
• Birth City: Oxford, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Stephen Hawking was a scientist known for his work with black holes and relativity, and the author of popular science books like 'A Brief History of Time.'
• Science and Medicine
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• University of Cambridge
• Gonville & Caius College
• Oxford University
• California Institute of Technology
• Interesting Facts
• As an author, Stephen Hawking was best known for his best seller 'A Brief History of Time.'
• At the age of 21, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease).
• Death Year: 2018
• Death date: March 14, 2018
• Death City: Cambridge, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right , contact us !

• My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
• Not only does God definitely play dice, but He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen.
• Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.
• Before my condition was diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing.
• I believe that life on Earth is at an ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden global warming, nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn't go into space.
• Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
• It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.
• It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
• If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist.
• I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.
• Science is beautiful when it makes simple explanations of phenomena or connections between different observations. Examples include the double helix in biology, and the fundamental equations of physics.
• People who boast about their I.Q. are losers.
• We shouldn't be surprised that conditions in the universe are suitable for life, but this is not evidence that the universe was designed to allow for life. We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God. There's not much personal about the laws of physics.

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Stephen Hawking biography: Theories, books & quotes

A brief history of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.

• Scientific achievements
• Filmography
• Quotes and controversial statements

Additional resources

Stephen Hawking is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history. 

His work on the origins and structure of the universe, from the Big Bang to black holes, revolutionized the field, while his best-selling books have appealed to readers who may not have Hawking's scientific background. Hawking died on March 14, 2018 , at the age of 76.

Stephen Hawking was seen by many as the world's smartest person, though he never revealed his IQ score. When asked about his IQ score by a New York Times reporter he replied, "I have no idea, people who boast about their IQ are losers," according to the news site The Atlantic .  

Related: 4 bizarre Stephen Hawking theories that turned out to be right (and 6 we're not sure about)

In this brief biography, we look at Hawking's education and career — ranging from his discoveries to the popular books he's written — and the disease that robbed him of mobility and speech.   

The early life of Stephen Hawking

British cosmologist Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England on Jan. 8, 1942  — 300 years to the day after the death of the astronomer Galileo Galilei . He attended University College, Oxford, where he studied physics, despite his father's urging to focus on medicine. Hawking went on to Cambridge to research cosmology , the study of the universe as a whole. 

In early 1963, just shy of his 21st birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) . Doctors told Hawkings that he would likely not survive more than two years with the disease. Completing his doctorate did not appear likely, but Hawking defied the odds. He also obtained his PhD in 1966 for his thesis entitled " Properties of expanding universes ". In that same year, Hawking also won the prestigious Adams Prize for his essay entitled "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time".

From then Hawking went on to forge new roads into the understanding of the universe in the decades since. 

As the disease spread, Hawking became less mobile and began using a wheelchair. Talking grew more challenging and, in 1985, an emergency tracheotomy caused his total loss of speech. A speech-generating device constructed at Cambridge, combined with a software program, served as his electronic voice, allowing Hawking to select his words by moving the muscles in his cheek.

Just before his diagnosis, Hawking met Jane Wilde, and the two were married in 1965. The couple had three children before separating in 1990. Hawking remarried in 1995 to Elaine Mason but divorced in 2006.

Stephen Hawking's greatest scientific achievements

Throughout his career, Hawking proposed several theories regarding astronomical anomalies, posed curious questions about the cosmos and enlightened the world about the origin of everything. Here are just some of the many milestones Hawking made in the name of science. 

In 1970, Hawkings and fellow physicist and Oxford classmate, Roger Penrose, published a joint paper entitled " The singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology ". In this paper, Hawking and Penrose proposed a new theory of spacetime singularities — a breakdown in the fabric of the universe found in one of Hawking's later discoveries, the black hole. This early work not only challenged concepts in physics but also supported the concept of the Big Bang as the birth of the universe, as outlined in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in the 1940s. 

Over the course of his career, Hawking studied the basic laws governing the universe. In 1974, Hawking published another paper called " Black hole explosions? ", in which he outlined a theorem that united Einstein's theory of general relativity, with quantum theory — which explains the behavior of matter and energy on an atomic level. In this new paper, Hawking hypothesized that matter not only fell into the gravitational pull of black holes but that photons radiated from them — which has now been confirmed in laboratory experiments by the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel — aptly named "Hawking radiation". 

In 1974, Hawking was inducted into the Royal Society, a worldwide fellowship of scientists. Five years later, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the most famous academic chair in the world (the second holder was Sir Isaac Newton , also a member of the Royal Society).

During the 1980s, Hawking turned his attention to the Big Bang and the uncertainties about the beginning of the universe. "Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there’s no way one could measure what happened at them. Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang," he said during his lecture called The Beginning of Time . In 1983, Hawking, along with scientists James Harlte, published a paper outlining their " no-boundary proposal " for the universe. In their paper, Hawking and Hartle describe the shape of the universe as reminiscent of a shuttlecock — with the Big Bang at the narrowest point and the expanding universe emerging from it.

Related: Can we time travel? A theoretical physicist provides some answers

Books by Stephen Hawking

In the last three decades of Hawking's life, he not only continued to publish academic literature, but he also published several popular science books to share his theories of the history of the universe with the layperson. His most popular book " A Brief History of Time " (10th-anniversary edition: Bantam, 1998) was first published in 1988 and became an international bestseller. It has sold almost 10 million copies and has been translated into 40 different languages.

Hawking went on to write other nonfiction books aimed at non-scientists. These include " A Briefer History of Time ," " The Universe in a Nutshell ," " The Grand Design " and " On the Shoulders of Giants ." 

Along with his many successful books about the inner workings of the universe, Hawking also began a series of science fiction books called " George and the Big Bang ", with his daughter Lucy Hawking in 2011. Aimed at middle school children, the series follows George's adventures as he travels through space. 

Stephen Hawking's filmography

Hawking has made several television appearances, including a playing hologram of himself on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and a cameo on the television show "Big Bang Theory." He has also voiced himself in several episodes of the animated series "Futurama" and "The Simpson". In 1997, PBS also presented an educational miniseries titled " Stephen Hawking's Universe ," which probes the theories of the cosmologist. 

 In 2014, a movie based on Hawking's life was released. Called "The Theory of Everything," the film drew praise from Hawking , who said it made him reflect on his own life. "Although I'm severely disabled, I have been successful in my scientific work," Hawking wrote on Facebook in November 2014. "I travel widely and have been to Antarctica and Easter Island, down in a submarine and up on a zero-gravity flight. One day, I hope to go into space." 

Related: The Theory of Everything: Searching for the universal rules of physics

Stephen Hawking's quotes and controversial statements

Hawking's quotes range from notable to poetic to controversial. Among them: 

• "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? "— A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , 1988 
• "All of my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist."— Stephen Hawking's Universe , 1997.  
• "Science predicts that many different kinds of universe will be spontaneously created out of nothing. It is a matter of chance which we are in." — The Guardian, 2011 .
• "We should seek the greatest value of our action." — The Guardian, 2011. 
• "The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired. "— A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , 1988.   
• "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."  
• "It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value." — Life in the Universe , 1996.  
• "One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem." — A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes , 1988.  
• "It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven't done badly. People won't have time for you if you are always angry or complaining." — The Guardian, 2005 . 
• "I relish the rare opportunity I've been given to live the life of the mind. But I know I need my body and that it will not last forever." — Stem Cell Universe , 2014. 

A list of Hawking quotes would be incomplete without mentioning some of his more controversial statements.

He frequently said that humans must leave Earth if we wished to survive. 

• "It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million...Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space," he said during an interview with video site Big Think , 2010. 
• "[W]e must … continue to go into space for the future of humanity…I don't think we will survive another 1,000 years without escaping beyond our fragile planet,"  Hawking said during a lecture at the Oxford Union debating society , 2016. 
• "We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds. It is time to explore other solar systems. Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth," he said during a speech at the Starmus Festival in Norway, 2017. 

He also said time travel should be possible, and that we should explore space for the romance of it. 

"Time travel used to be thought of as just science fiction, but Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that you could go off in a rocket and return before you set out. I was one of the first to write about the conditions under which this would be possible. I showed it would require matter with negative energy density, which may not be available. Other scientists took courage from my paper and wrote further papers on the subject," he told the new site Parade in 2010. "Science is not only a disciple of reason, but, also, one of romance and passion," he adds.

The theoretical physicist was also concerned that robots could not only have an impact on the economy but also mean doom for humanity.

"The automation of factories has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or supervisory roles remaining," he wrote in a 2016 column in The Guardian .

"The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race," he told the BBC in 2014. Hawking added, however, that AI developed to date has been helpful. It's more the self-replication potential that worries him. "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

"The genie is out of the bottle. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether," Hawking told WIRED in November 2017.

An avowed atheist, Hawking also occasionally waded into the topic of religion.

• "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." — The Grand Design, by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. 
• "I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail…There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he said during a 2011 interview with The Guardian .
• "Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by 'we would know the mind of God' is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn't. I'm an atheist," Hawking said in a 2014 interview with the news site El Mundo .  

For more information about Stephen Hawking, his theories and read through the many transcriptions of his influential lectures, check out his official website . You can also watch Hawking probe the origins of the cosmos in his extraordinary TED talk .  

Bibliography

#5: Stephen Hawking’s warning: Abandon earth-or face extinction . Big Think. (2010, July 27). https://bigthink.com/surprising-science/5-stephen-hawkings-warning-abandon-earth-or-face-extinction/

Beck, J. (2017, October 11). “people who boast about their IQ are losers.” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/trump-tillerson-iq-brag-boast-psychology-study/542544/

The beginning of time . Stephen Hawking. (n.d.-c). https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/the-beginning-of-time

Guardian News and Media. (2005, September 27). Interview: Stephen Hawking . The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/sep/27/scienceandnature.highereducationprofile

Guardian News and Media. (2011a, May 15). Stephen Hawking: “there is no heaven; it’s a Fairy story.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

Guardian News and Media. (2011b, May 15). Stephen Hawking: “there is no heaven; it’s a Fairy story.” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/may/15/stephen-hawking-interview-there-is-no-heaven

Guardian News and Media. (2016, December 1). This is the most dangerous time for our planet | Stephen Hawking . The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/01/stephen-hawking-dangerous-time-planet-inequality

Hartle, J. B., & Hawking, S. W. (1983, December 15). Wave function of the universe . Physical Review D. https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.28.2960

Hawking radiation and the sonic black hole - technion - israel institute of technology . Technion. (2021, February 17). https://www.technion.ac.il/en/2021/02/hawking-radiation-and-the-sonic-black-hole/

Hawking, S. W. (1974, March 1). Black Hole Explosions? . Nature News. https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0

Life in the universe . Stephen Hawking. (n.d.-a). https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/life-in-the-universe

Medeiros, J. (2017, November 28). Stephen Hawking: “I fear ai may replace humans altogether.” WIRED UK. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/stephen-hawking-interview-alien-life-climate-change-donald-trump

Oxford Union Speech . Stephen Hawking. (n.d.-b). https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/speeches/speech-5

Pablo Jáuregui, Enviado especial Guía de Isora (Tenerife), & Chocolatillo. (2018, March 14). Stephen Hawking: “no hay ningún dios. soy ateo.” ELMUNDO. https://www.elmundo.es/ciencia/2014/09/21/541dbc12ca474104078b4577.html

The singularities of gravitational collapse and cosmology . Royal Society Publishing. (1970, January 27). https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.1970.0021

Hawking, S. W. (1966). Properties of expanding universes. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283

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Biography Online

Stephen Hawking Biography

Early life Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England. His family had moved to Oxford to escape the threat of V2 rockets over London. As a child, he showed prodigious talent and unorthodox study methods. On leaving school, he got a place at University College, Oxford University where he studied Physics. His physics tutor at Oxford, Robert Berman, later said that Stephen Hawking was an extraordinary student. He used few books and made no notes, but could work out theorems and solutions in a way other students couldn’t.

“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

– Stephen Hawking’s Universe (1985) by John Boslough, Ch. 7

It was in Cambridge that Stephen Hawking first started to develop symptoms of neuro-muscular problems – a type of motor neuron disease. This quickly started to hamper his physical movements. His speech became slurred, and he became unable to even to feed himself. At one stage, the doctors gave him a lifespan of three years. However, the progress of the disease slowed down, and he has managed to overcome his severe disability to continue his research and active public engagements. At Cambridge, a fellow scientist developed a synthetic speech device which enabled him to speak by using a touchpad. This early synthetic speech sound has become the ‘voice’ of Stephen Hawking, and as a result, he has kept the original sound of this early model – despite technological advancements.

Nevertheless, despite the latest technology, it can still be a time-consuming process for him to communicate. Stephen Hawking has taken a pragmatic view to his disability:

“It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven’t done badly. People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining. ” The Guardian (27 September 2005)

Stephen Hawking’s principal fields of research have been involved in theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

Amongst many other achievements, he developed a mathematical model for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He has also undertaken a lot of work on the nature of the Universe, The Big Bang and Black Holes.

In 1974, he outlined his theory that black holes leak energy and fade away to nothing. This became known as “Hawking radiation” in 1974. With mathematicians Roger Penrose he demonstrated that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity implies space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.

Despite being one of the best physicists of his generation, he has also been able to translate difficult physics models into a general understanding for the general public. His books – A Brief History of Time and The Universe in A Nutshell have both became runaway bestsellers – with a Brief History of Time staying in the Bestsellers lists for over 230 weeks and selling over 10 million copies. In his books, Hawking tries to explain scientific concepts in everyday language and give an overview to the workings behind the cosmos.

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”

–  A Brief History Of Time (1998) ch. 8

Stephen Hawking has become one of the most famous scientists of his generation. He makes frequent public engagements and his portrayed himself in popular media culture from programmes, such as The Simpsons to Star Trek.

Hawking had the capacity to relate the most complex physics to relateable incidents in everyday life.

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.”

Stephen Hawking. 7 January 2016 –  Reith lecture at the Royal Institute in London.

In the late 1990s, he was reportedly offered a knighthood, but 10 years later revealed he had turned it down over issues with the government’s funding for science

He married Jane Wilde, a language student in 1965. He said this was a real turning point for him at a time when he was fatalistic because of his illness. They later divorced but had three children.

Stephen Hawking passed away on 14 March 2018 at his home in Cambridge.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Stephen Hawking ”, Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net . Last updated 15 January 2018.

A Brief History Of Time

A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking at Amazon

Quotes of Stephen Hawking

“If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

– Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

– A Brief History of Time (1988)

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.”

– Stephen Hawking

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”

– Stephen Hawking (BT advert 1993)

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Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942–March 14, 2018) was a world-renowned cosmologist and physicist, especially esteemed for overcoming an extreme physical disability to pursue his groundbreaking scientific work. He was a bestselling author whose books made complex ideas accessible to the general public. His theories provided deep insights into the connections between quantum physics and relativity, including how those concepts might be united in explaining fundamental questions related to the development of the universe and the formation of black holes.

Fast Facts: Stephen Hawking

• Known For : Cosmologist, physicist, best-selling science writer
• Also Known As : Steven William Hawking
• Born : January 8, 1942 in Oxfordshire, England
• Parents : Frank and Isobel Hawking
• Died: March 14, 2018 in Cambridge, England
• Education : St Albans School, B.A., University College, Oxford, Ph.D., Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1966
• Published Works :  A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, The Universe in a Nutshell, On the Shoulders of Giants, A Briefer History of Time, The Grand Design, My Brief History
• Awards and Honors : Fellow of the Royal Society, the Eddington Medal, the Royal Society's Hughes Medal, the Albert Einstein Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord, the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society
• Spouses : Jane Wilde, Elaine Mason
• Children : Robert, Lucy, Timothy
• Notable Quote : “Most of the threats we face come from the progress we’ve made in science and technology. We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognize the dangers and control them. I’m an optimist, and I believe we can.”

Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxfordshire, England, where his mother had been sent for safety during the German bombings of London of World War II. His mother Isobel Hawking was an Oxford graduate and his father Frank Hawking was a medical researcher.

After Stephen's birth, the family reunited in London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. The family then moved to St. Albans so that Stephen's father could pursue medical research at the nearby Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill.

Education and Medical Diagnosis

Stephen Hawking attended school in St. Albans, where he was an unexceptional student. His brilliance was much more apparent in his years at Oxford University. He specialized in physics and graduated with first-class honors despite his relative lack of diligence. In 1962, he continued his education at Cambridge University, pursuing a Ph.D. in cosmology.

At age 21, a year after beginning his doctoral program, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as motor neuron disease, ALS, and Lou Gehrig's disease). Given only three years to live, he has written that this prognosis helped motivate him in his physics work .

There is little doubt that his ability to remain actively engaged with the world through his scientific work helped him persevere in the face of the disease. The support of family and friends were equally key. This is vividly portrayed in the dramatic film "The Theory of Everything."

The ALS Progresses

As his illness progressed, Hawking became less mobile and began using a wheelchair. As part of his condition, Hawking eventually lost his ability to speak, so he utilized a device capable of translating his eye movements (since he could no longer utilize a keypad) to speak in a digitized voice.

In addition to his keen mind within physics, he gained respect throughout the world as a science communicator. His achievements are deeply impressive on their own, but some of the reason he is so universally respected was his ability to accomplish so much while suffering the severe debility caused by ALS.

Marriage and Children

Just before his diagnosis, Hawking met Jane Wilde, and the two were married in 1965. The couple had three children before separating. Hawking later married Elaine Mason in 1995 and they divorced in 2006.

Career as Academic and Author

Hawking stayed on at Cambridge after his graduation, first as a research fellow and then as a professional fellow. For most of his academic career, Hawking served as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton .

Following a long tradition, Hawking retired from this post at age 67, in the spring of 2009, though he continued his research at the university's cosmology institute. In 2008 he also accepted a position as a visiting researcher at Waterloo, Ontario's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

In 1982 Hawking began work on a popular book on cosmology. By 1984 he had produced the first draft of "A Brief History of Time," which he published in 1988 after some medical setbacks. This book remained on the Sunday Times bestsellers list for 237 weeks. Hawking's even more accessible "A Briefer History of Time" was published in 2005.

Fields of Study

Hawking's major research was in the areas of theoretical cosmology , focusing on the evolution of the universe as governed by the laws of general relativity . He is most well-known for his work in the study of black holes . Through his work, Hawking was able to:

• Prove that singularities are general features of spacetime.
• Provide mathematical proof that information which fell into a black hole was lost.
• Demonstrate that black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation .

On March 14, 2018, Stephen Hawking died in his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76. His ashes were placed in London’s Westminster Abbey between the final resting places of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

Stephen Hawking made large contributions as a scientist, science communicator, and as a heroic example of how enormous obstacles can be overcome. The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication is a prestigious award that "recognizes the merit of popular science on an international level."

Thanks to his distinctive appearance, voice, and popularity, Stephen Hawking is often represented in popular culture. He made appearances on the television shows "The Simpsons" and "Futurama," as well as having a cameo on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1993.

"The Theory of Everything," a biographical drama film about Hawking's life, was released in 2014.

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Comment and Physics

A brief history of stephen hawking: a legacy of paradox.

By Stuart Clark

14 March 2018

Gemma Levine/Getty

Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist, has died at the age of 76.

Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour 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 for ever.”

Stephen Hawking dies aged 76

Tributes flow in following the death of world-famous theoretical physicist stephen hawking.

The most recognisable scientist of our age, Hawking holds an iconic status. His genre-defining book, A Brief History of Time , has sold more than 10 million copies since its publication in 1988, and has been translated into more than 35 languages. He appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation , The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory . His early life was the subject of an Oscar-winning performance by Eddie Redmayne in the 2014 film  The Theory of Everything . He was routinely consulted for oracular pronouncements on everything from time travel and alien life to Middle Eastern politics and nefarious robots . He had an endearing sense of humour and a daredevil attitude – relatable human traits that, combined with his seemingly superhuman mind, made Hawking eminently marketable.

But his cultural status – amplified by his disability and the media storm it invoked – often overshadowed his scientific legacy. That’s a shame for the man who discovered what might prove to be the key clue to the theory of everything , advanced our understanding of space and time, helped shape the course of physics for the last four decades and whose insight continues to drive progress in fundamental physics today.

Beginning with the big bang

Hawking’s research career began with disappointment. Arriving at the University of Cambridge in 1962 to begin his PhD, he was told that Fred Hoyle , his chosen supervisor, already had a full complement of students. The most famous British astrophysicist at the time, Hoyle was a magnet for the more ambitious students. Hawking didn’t make the cut. Instead, he was to work with Dennis Sciama, a physicist Hawking knew nothing about. In the same year, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neurone disease that quickly robs people of the ability to voluntarily move their muscles. He was told he had two years to live.

Although Hawking’s body may have weakened, his intellect stayed sharp. Two years into his PhD, he was having trouble walking and talking, but it was clear that the disease was progressing more slowly than the doctors had initially feared. Meanwhile, his engagement to Jane Wilde – with whom he later had three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim – renewed his drive to make real progress in physics.

Stephen and Lucy Hawking

James Veysey/Camera Press

Working with Sciama had its advantages. Hoyle’s fame meant that he was seldom in the department, whereas Sciama was around and eager to talk. Those discussions stimulated the young Hawking to pursue his own scientific vision. Hoyle was vehemently opposed to the big bang theory (in fact, he had coined the name “big bang” in mockery). Sciama, on the other hand, was happy for Hawking to investigate the beginning of time.

Time’s arrow

Hawking was studying the work of Roger Penrose , which proved that if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, at the heart of every black hole must be a point where space and time themselves break down – a singularity. Hawking realised that if time’s arrow were reversed, the same reasoning would hold true for the universe as a whole. Under Sciama’s encouragement, he worked out the maths and was able to prove it: the universe according to general relativity began in a singularity.

Hawking was well aware, however, that Einstein didn’t have the last word. General relativity, which describes space and time on a large scale, doesn’t take into account quantum mechanics , which describes matter’s strange behaviour at much smaller scales. Some unknown “theory of everything” was needed to unite the two. For Hawking, the singularity at the universe’s origin did not signal the breakdown of space and time; it signalled the need for quantum gravity .

Luckily, the link that he forged between Penrose’s singularity and the singularity at the big bang provided a key clue for finding such a theory. If physicists wanted to understand the origin of the universe, Hawking had just shown them exactly where to look: a black hole .

Black holes were a subject ripe for investigation in the early 1970s. Although Karl Schwarzschild had found such objects lurking in the equations of general relativity back in 1915, theoreticians viewed them as mere mathematical anomalies and were reluctant to believe they could actually exist.

Albeit frightening, their action is reasonably straightforward: black holes have such strong gravitational fields that nothing, not even light, can escape their grip. Any matter that falls into one is forever lost to the outside world. This, however, is a dagger in the heart of thermodynamics.

Stephen Hawking's final theorem turns time and causality inside out

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Thermodynamic threat

The second law of thermodynamics is one of the most well-established laws of nature. It states that the entropy, or level of disorder in a system, always increases. The second law gives form to the observation that ice cubes will melt into a puddle, but a puddle of water will never spontaneously turn into a block of ice. All matter contains entropy, so what happens when it is dropped into a black hole? Is entropy lost along with it? If so, the total entropy of the universe goes down and black holes would violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Hawking thought that this was fine. He was happy to discard any concept that stood in the way to a deeper truth. And if that meant the second law, then so be it.

Bekenstein and breakthrough

But Hawking met his match at a 1972 physics summer school in the French ski resort of Les Houches, France. Princeton University graduate student Jacob Bekenstein thought that the second law of thermodynamics should apply to black holes too. Bekenstein had been studying the entropy problem and had reached a possible solution thanks to an earlier insight of Hawking’s .

A black hole hides its singularity with a boundary known as the event horizon. Nothing that crosses the event horizon can ever return to the outside. Hawking’s work had shown that the area of a black hole’s event horizon never decreases over time. What’s more, when matter falls into a black hole, the area of its event horizon grows.

Bekenstein realised this was key to the entropy problem. Every time a black hole swallows matter, its entropy appears to be lost, and at the same time, its event horizon grows. So, Bekenstein suggested, what if – to preserve the second law – the area of the horizon is itself a measure of entropy?

Hawking immediately disliked the idea and was angry that his own work had been used in support of a concept so flawed. With entropy comes heat, but the black hole couldn’t be radiating heat – nothing can escape its pull of gravity. During a break from the lectures, Hawking got together with colleagues Brandon Carter, who also studied under Sciama, and James Bardeen, of the University of Washington, and confronted Bekenstein.

The disagreement bothered Bekenstein. “These three were senior people. I was just out of my PhD. You worry whether you are just stupid and these guys know the truth,” he recalls.

Back in Cambridge, Hawking set out to prove Bekenstein wrong. Instead, he discovered the precise form of the mathematical relationship between entropy and the black hole’s horizon. Rather than destroying the idea, he had confirmed it. It was Hawking’s greatest breakthrough.

Hawking radiation

Hawking now embraced the idea that thermodynamics played a part in black holes. Anything that has entropy, he reasoned, also has a temperature – and anything that has a temperature can radiate.

His original mistake, Hawking realised, was in only considering general relativity, which says that nothing – no particles, no heat – can escape the grip of a black hole. That changes when quantum mechanics comes into play. According to quantum mechanics, fleeting pairs of particles and antiparticles are constantly appearing out of empty space, only to annihilate and disappear in the blink of an eye. When this happens in the vicinity of an event horizon, a particle-antiparticle pair can be separated – one falls behind the horizon while one escapes, leaving them forever unable to meet and annihilate. The orphaned particles stream away from the black hole’s edge as radiation. The randomness of quantum creation becomes the randomness of heat.

“I think most physicists would agree that Hawking’s greatest contribution is the prediction that black holes emit radiation,” says Sean Carroll , a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “While we still don’t have experimental confirmation that Hawking’s prediction is true, nearly every expert believes he was right.”

Experiments to test Hawking’s prediction are so difficult because the more massive a black hole is, the lower its temperature. For a large black hole – the kind astronomers can study with a telescope – the temperature of the radiation is too insignificant to measure. As Hawking himself often noted, it was for this reason that he was never awarded a Nobel Prize. Still, the prediction was enough to secure him a prime place in the annals of science, and the quantum particles that stream from the black hole’s edge would forever be known as Hawking radiation .

Some have suggested that they should more appropriately be called Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, but Bekenstein himself rejects this. “The entropy of a black hole is called Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, which I think is fine. I wrote it down first, Hawking found the numerical value of the constant, so together we found the formula as it is today. The radiation was really Hawking’s work. I had no idea how a black hole could radiate. Hawking brought that out very clearly. So that should be called Hawking radiation.”

Theory of everything

The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy equation is the one Hawking asked to have engraved on his tombstone. It represents the ultimate mash-up of physical disciplines because it contains Newton’s constant, which clearly relates to gravity; Planck’s constant, which betrays quantum mechanics at play; the speed of light, the talisman of Einstein’s relativity; and the Boltzmann constant, the herald of thermodynamics.

The presence of these diverse constants hinted at a theory of everything, in which all physics is unified. Furthermore, it strongly corroborated Hawking’s original hunch that understanding black holes would be key in unlocking that deeper theory.

Hawking’s breakthrough may have solved the entropy problem, but it raised an even more difficult problem in its wake. If black holes can radiate, they will eventually evaporate and disappear. So what happens to all the information that fell in? Does it vanish too? If so, it will violate a central tenet of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, if it escapes from the black hole, it will violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. With the discovery of black hole radiation, Hawking had pit the ultimate laws of physics against one another. The black hole information loss paradox had been born.

Hawking staked his position in another ground-breaking and even more contentious paper entitled Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse, published in Physical Review D in 1976. He argued that when a black hole radiates away its mass, it does take all of its information with it – despite the fact that quantum mechanics expressly forbids information loss. Soon other physicists would pick sides, for or against this idea, in a debate that continues to this day. Indeed, many feel that information loss is the most pressing obstacle in understanding quantum gravity.

“Hawking’s 1976 argument that black holes lose information is a towering achievement, perhaps one of the most consequential discoveries on the theoretical side of physics since the subject was invented,” says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley.

By the late 1990s, results emerging from string theory had most theoretical physicists convinced that Hawking was wrong about information loss, but Hawking, known for his stubbornness, dug in his heels. It wasn’t until 2004 that he would change his mind. And he did it with flair – dramatically showing up at a conference in Dublin and announcing his updated view : black holes cannot lose information.

Today, however, a new paradox known as the firewall has thrown everything into doubt (see “Hawking’s paradox”, below). It is clear that the question Hawking raised is at the core of the quest for quantum gravity.

“Black hole radiation raises serious puzzles we are still working very hard to understand,” says Carroll . “It’s fair to say that Hawking radiation is the single biggest clue we have to the ultimate reconciliation of quantum mechanics and gravity, arguably the greatest challenge facing theoretical physics today.”

Hawking’s legacy, says Bousso, will be “having put his finger on the key difficulty in the search for a theory of everything”.

Hawking continued pushing the boundaries of theoretical physics at a seemingly impossible pace for the rest of his life. He made important inroads towards understanding how quantum mechanics applies to the universe as a whole, leading the way in the field known as quantum cosmology. His progressive disease pushed him to tackle problems in novel ways, which contributed to his remarkable intuition for his subject. As he lost the ability to write out long, complicated equations, Hawking found new and inventive methods to solve problems in his head, usually by reimagining them in geometric form. But, like Einstein before him, Hawking never produced anything quite as revolutionary as his early work.

“Hawking’s most influential work was done in the 1970s, when he was younger,” says Carroll, “but that’s completely standard even for physicists who aren’t burdened with a debilitating neurone disease.”

Stephen Hawking's black hole paradox may finally have a solution

Black holes may not destroy all information about what they were originally made of, according to a new set of quantum calculations, which would solve a major physics paradox first described by Stephen Hawking

Hawking the superstar

In the meantime, the publication of A Brief History of Time catapulted Hawking to cultural stardom and gave a fresh face to theoretical physics. He never seemed to mind. “In front of the camera, Hawking played the character of Hawking. He seemed to play with his cultural status,” says Hélène Mialet, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who courted controversy in 2012 with the publication of her book Hawking Incorporated. In it, she investigated the way the people around Hawking helped him build and maintain his public image .

That public image undoubtedly made his life easier than it might otherwise have been. As Hawking’s disease progressed, technologists gladly provided increasingly complicated machines to allow him to communicate. This, in turn, let him continue doing the thing for which he should ultimately be remembered: his science.

“Stephen Hawking has done more to advance our understanding of gravitation than anyone since Einstein,” Carroll says. “He was a world-leading theoretical physicist, clearly the best in the world for his time among those working at the intersection of gravity and quantum mechanics, and he did it all in the face of a terrible disease. He is an inspirational figure, and history will certainly remember him that way.”

Hawking's paradox

In 2012, four physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara – Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski and James Sully, known collectively by physicists as AMPS – shocked the physics community with the results of a thought experiment .

When pairs of particles and antiparticles spawn near a black hole's event horizon, each pair shares a connection called entanglement. But what happens to this link and the information it holds when one of the pair falls in, leaving its twin to become a particle of Hawking radiation (see main story)?

One school of thought holds that the information is preserved as the hole evaporates, and that it is placed into subtle correlations among these particles of Hawking radiation.

But, AMPS asked, what does it look like to observers inside and outside the black hole? Enter Alice and Bob.

According to Bob, who remains outside the black hole, that particle has been separated from its antiparticle partner by the horizon. In order to preserve information, it must become entangled with another particle of Hawking radiation.

But what's happening from the point of view of Alice, who falls into the black hole? General relativity says that for a free-falling observer, gravity disappears, so she doesn't see the event horizon. According to Alice, the particle in question remains entangled with its antiparticle partner, because there is no horizon to separate them. The paradox is born.

So who is right? Bob or Alice? If it's Bob, then Alice will not encounter empty space at the horizon as general relativity claims. Instead she will be burned to a crisp by a wall of Hawking radiation – a firewall. If it's Alice who's right, then information will be lost, breaking a fundamental rule of quantum mechanics. "The fervent controversy surrounding Hawking's paradox reflects the stakes his work has raised: in quantising gravity, what gives? And how much?" says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. The answer awaits us in the theory of everything. Amanda Gefter

Article amended on 14 March 2018

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Stephen Hawking Biography

Born: January 8, 1942 Oxford, England English scientist, physicist, and mathematician

British physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking has made fundamental contributions to the science of cosmology—the study of the origins, structure, and space-time relationships of the universe.

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. His father, a well-known researcher in tropical medicine, urged his son to seek a career in medicine, but Stephen found biology and medicine were not exact enough. Therefore, he turned to the study of mathematics and physics.

Hawking was not an outstanding student at St. Alban's School, nor later at Oxford University, which he entered in 1959. He was a social young man who did little schoolwork because he was able to grasp the essentials of a mathematics or physics problem quickly. At home he reports, "I would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn't often go back together." His early school years were marked by unhappiness at school, with his peers and on the playing field. While at Oxford he became increasingly interested in physics (study of matter and energy), eventually graduating with a first class honors in physics (1962). He immediately began postgraduate studies at Cambridge University.

Graduate school

The onset of Hawking's graduate education at Cambridge marked a turning point in his life. It was then that he embarked upon the formal study of cosmology, which focused his study. And it was then that he was first stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease, a weakening disease of the nervous and muscular system that eventually led to his total confinement in a wheelchair. At Cambridge his talents were recognized, and he was encouraged to carry on his studies despite his growing physical disabilities. His marriage in 1965 was an important step in his emotional life. Marriage gave him, he recalled, the determination to live and make professional progress in the world of science. Hawking received his doctorate degree in 1966. He then began his lifelong research and teaching association with Cambridge University.

Theory of singularity

Hawking made his first major contribution to science with his idea of singularity, a work that grew out of his collaboration (working relationship) with Roger Penrose. A singularity is a place in either space or time at which some quantity becomes infinite (without an end). Such a place is found in a black hole, the final stage of a collapsed star, where the gravitational field has infinite strength. Penrose proved that a singularity could exist in the space-time of a real universe.

Drawing upon the work of both Penrose and Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Hawking demonstrated that our universe had its origins in a singularity. In the beginning all of the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point, making a very small but tremendously dense body. Ten to twenty billion years ago that body exploded in a big bang that initiated time and the universe. Hawking was able to produce current astrophysical (having to do with the study of stars and the events that occur around them) research to support the big bang theory of the origin of the universe and oppose the competing steady-state theory.

Hawking's research led him to study the characteristics of the best-known singularity: the black hole. A black hole's edges, called the event horizon, can be detected. Hawking proved that the surface area (measurement of the surface) of the event horizon could only increase, not decrease, and that when two black holes merged the surface area of the new hole was larger than the sum of the two original.

Hawking's continuing examination of the nature of black holes led to two important discoveries. The first, that black holes can give off heat, opposed the claim that nothing could escape from a black hole. The second concerned the size of black holes. As originally conceived, black holes were immense in size because they were the end result of the collapse of gigantic stars. Hawking suggested the existence of millions of mini-black holes formed by the force of the original big bang explosion.

Unified field theory

In the 1980s Hawking answered one of Einstein's unanswered theories, the famous unified field theory. A complete unified theory includes the four main interactions known to modern physics. The unified theory explains the conditions that were present at the beginning of the universe as well as the features of the physical laws of nature. When humans develop the unified field theory, said Hawking, they will "know the mind of God."

Publications

As Hawking's physical condition grew worse his intellectual achievements increased. He wrote down his ideas in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. It sold over a million copies and was listed as the best-selling nonfiction book for over a year.

In 1993 Hawking wrote Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, which, in addition to his scientific thoughts, contains chapters about Hawking's personal life. He coauthored a book in 1996 with Sir Roger Penrose titled The Nature of Space and Time. Issues discussed in this book include whether the universe has boundaries and if it will continue to expand forever. Hawking says yes to the first question and no to the second, while Penrose argues the opposite. Hawking joined Penrose again the following year in the creation of another book, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (1997). In 2002 he was likewise celebrating the publication of The Universe in a Nutshell. Despite decreasing health, Hawking traveled on the traditional book release circuit. People with disabilities look to him as a hero.

Honors and commitments

Hawking's work in modern cosmology and in theoretical astronomy and physics is widely recognized. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1974 and five years later was named to a professorial chair at Cambridge University that was once held by Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Beyond these honors he has earned a host of honorary degrees, awards, prizes, and lectureships from the major universities and scientific societies of Europe and America. By the end of the twentieth century Stephen Hawking had become one of the best-known scientists in the world. His popularity includes endorsing a wireless Internet connection and speaking to wheelchair-bound youth. He also had a special appearance on the television series Star Trek.

Though very private, it is generally known that Stephen's first marriage ended in 1991. He has three children from that marriage.

When asked about his objectives, Hawking told Zygon in a 1995 interview, "My goal is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."

For More Information

Ferguson, Kitty. Stephen Hawking: A Quest for a Theory of the Universe. New York: F. Watts, 1991.

Henderson, Harry. Stephen Hawking. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1995.

McDaniel, Melissa. Stephen Hawking: Revolutionary Physicist. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.

White, Michael, and John Gribbin. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science. New York: Viking, 1992.

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• 14 March 2018

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)

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Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom. He was a student in Dennis Sciama’s research group at the University of Cambridge at the same time as Stephen Hawking.

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Stephen Hawking in Cambridge, January 1993. Credit: David Montgomery/Getty

When Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor-neuron disease at the age of 21, it wasn’t clear that he would finish his PhD. Against all expectations, he lived on for 55 years, becoming one of the world’s most celebrated scientists.

Hawking, who died on 14 March 2018, was born in Oxford, UK, in 1942 to a medical-researcher father and a philosophy-graduate mother. After attending St Albans School near London, he earned a first-class degree in physics from the University of Oxford. He began his research career in 1962, enrolling as a graduate student in a group at the University of Cambridge led by one of the fathers of modern cosmology, Dennis Sciama.

The general theory of relativity was at that time undergoing a renaissance, initiated in part by Roger Penrose at Birkbeck College, London, who had introduced new mathematical techniques. These showed that generic gravitational collapse would lead to singularities — infinities that signal the need for new physics.

Stephen Hawking: A life in science

The implications for black holes and the Big Bang were developed by Hawking in a series of papers collated in the 1973 monograph The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge University Press), co-authored with George Ellis, a near-contemporary who had also been a student of Sciama. Especially important was the realization that the area of black holes’ horizons (‘one-way membranes’ that shroud the singularities, and from within which nothing can escape) could never decrease. The analogy with entropy — a measure of disorder that likewise can never decrease — was developed further by physicist Jacob Bekenstein.

These findings gained Hawking election to the Royal Society in London in 1974, at the age of 32. By then, he was so frail that both movement and speech were difficult, and most of us suspected that his days in front-line research were numbered. But in that same year, he came up with his most distinctive contribution to science: Hawking radiation.

By linking quantum theory and gravity, Hawking showed that a black hole would not be completely black, but would radiate with a well-defined temperature that depended inversely on its mass ( S. W. Hawking Nature 248, 30–31; 1974 ). Black-hole entropy was more than just an analogy. The implication was that the radiation would cause black holes to ‘evaporate’. This process would be unobservably slow, except in ‘mini-holes’ the size of atoms — and these are thought not to exist. Yet Hawking radiation — and the related issue of whether information that falls into a black hole is lost or is somehow recoverable from the radiation — was a profound issue, and one that still engenders controversy among theoretical physicists. Indeed, theorist Andrew Strominger at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in 2016 that one of Hawking’s papers on the subject ( S. W. Hawking Phys. Rev. D 14, 2460–2473; 1976 ) had caused “more sleepless nights among theoretical physicists than any paper in history”.

By the end of the 1970s, Hawking had been appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (former incumbents include Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac); he held the post until he retired in 2009. During these years, in which his focus shifted to the quantum aspects of the Big Bang, the issue of information loss in black holes continued to challenge him.

In 1985, Stephen underwent a tracheotomy, which removed his already limited powers of speech. He was able to control a cursor on a screen and type out sentences — albeit with increasingly painful slowness (first with his hand, and eventually only with a cheek muscle). A speech synthesizer processed his words and generated the androidal accent that became his trademark. In this way, he completed his best-selling book A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988), which propelled him to celebrity status.

Had Hawking achieved equal distinction in any other branch of science besides cosmology, it probably would not have had the same resonance with a worldwide public. As I put it in The Telegraph newspaper in 2007, “the concept of an imprisoned mind roaming the cosmos” grabbed people’s imagination.

In 1965, Stephen married Jane Wilde. After 25 years of marriage, and three children, the strain of Stephen’s illness and of sharing their home with a team of nurses became too much and they separated, divorcing in 1995. Jane wrote a book about their life together, Travelling to Infinity (Alma, 2008), and both she and Stephen were happy with the telling of their story in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything (although it elides and conflates Stephen’s science). After a second, briefer marriage, Stephen was supported by an entourage of assistants, as well as his family.

Stephen remained remarkably positive throughout his life, despite the immense frustration that his condition clearly caused. He enjoyed theatre and opera trips, and he seemed energized rather than exhausted by his travels to all parts of the world, as well as by his regular trips to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He retained robust common sense and a sense of humour, expressed forceful opinions, supported political causes and was happy to engage with the media, despite its insistent attention. His comments gained outsized attention even on subjects in which he was not a specialist, such as philosophy and the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Stephen’s expectations when he was diagnosed dropped to zero; he said that everything that had happened since had been a bonus. And what a bonus — for physics, for the millions enlightened by his books and for the even larger number inspired by his achievement against all the odds.

Nature 555 , 444 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02839-9

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A Brief History of Stephen Hawking

“I am just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.”

He was an exception, a genius and a curious mind. Challenging the future, racing against his own time, he might be one of the powerful examples of sheer determination and hope. He made way ahead…in his wheelchair, traveled around the world, studying and giving lecturers about Time & Space.

Yes, we are addressing the prodigy, the King of Physics- Professor Stephen William Hawking, a Physicist, Cosmologist and a dreamer. “Although I cannot move, I have to speak through a computer, but in my mind, I am free,” said Stephen Hawking during one of his lectures.

Here is a brief rundown of the brilliant theoretical physicist and his groundbreaking works in the field of Cosmology and Physics.

• Stephen Hawking was born on 8 th of January 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo.
• At School, he was nicknamed as ‘Einstein’.
• He did his degree in natural sciences, specializing in Physics from Oxford University, London.
• In 1962, he graduated with first-class honors and left for Cambridge University to begin his Ph.D.

His race against time and life

• At 21, he was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) which is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord.
• He returned to Cambridge to complete his PhD
• He worked on one of the most debated topics at that period of time: ‘T he existence of Universe and its birth.’
• In 1965, he made a breakthrough discovery. His theory stated that ‘the Universe had a beginning.’ He controversially showed that there is no need of a creator or a god because the universe came to an existence all by itself.

The black-hole theory

The concept of singularity refers to a one-dimensional point which contain huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely and where the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate. Basically, it is the center of the black hole where gravity is thought to approach infinity.

Hawking applied the same notion of singularity to the entire universe, and there he had the ground-breaking discovery about the universe.

A series of Achievements

• Stephen did path-breaking work on singularities which proved that the universe might have begun in singularity.
• He co-discovered the four laws of black hole mechanics.
• His discovery in 1970 threw all the cosmologist’s finding till the date in the air. By using quantum theory and general relativity, he was able to show that black holes can emit radiations, which is now known as Hawking Radiation.
• In 1974, his name was inducted into the Royal Society, one of the most prestigious bodies of the Scientists. His name sat along Sir Issac Newton and Charles Darwin.
• He made contributions to the theory of cosmic inflation.
• In 1988, his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ was published.
• It was sold about 8 million copies and stayed on the best-seller list for over 4 years and entered into the Guinness book for the record for doing so.
• In 2002, he was ranked as one of the 100 greatest Britons in BBC poll.

The next finding on black-hole

Initially, it was believed that a black hole can only increase, never decrease in size. It was very obvious since nothing can escape that gets close, it can only swallow more matter and gain mass.

But later it was discovered that black holes emit radiation, (known as Hawking Radiation) and gradually disappears. It was a remarkably important discovery as this result unified the Relativity theory, Quantum Theory and Fermi Dynamics, the unification of 3 concepts in the Physics.

“ We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special ,” said Stephen Hawking, the man who was certainly an outlier- who lived for 55 years with a disease which only had an average life-expectancy of 3 years. He defied the odds, not only attained his Ph.D. but also forged new roads into understanding the universe for decades.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What did Hawking discover?

Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes emit radiation which can be detected by special instrumentation, thus making the study of black holes possible.

2. How did Stephen Hawking talk?

Stephen Hawking used a word synthesizer and a word prediction software to speak through a computer.

3. Why is Stephen Hawking important?

Stephen Hawking uncovered many secrets of the universe, pushing the field of science farther than any of his peers. His theoretical work on black holes made it possible to study these mysterious objects about which nothing was known before.

4. What is Stephen Hawking IQ level?

Stephen Hawking never revealed his IQ level. There are only speculations and most sources put it close to 160.

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Abhimanyu.R.B

July 3, 2020

He is an inspiration for the youth showing that nothing is impossible.

Astha Verma

September 1, 2019

Hawking is an extraordinary human ( don’t correct it he will live forever)?

May 31, 2019

He is Inspirational for students

Mohammad Abbas

October 13, 2018

Nice collection

Megha Unnikrishnan

July 7, 2018

He is a very miraculous person with determination and courage who battled the odds and hurdles in his life.His story is an inspirational one.

Priyanshi Jain

June 6, 2018

He is miraculous.

June 2, 2018

He was truly a great man with great mind,I love reading his theories about space as they are so amazing and interesting.He overvomed his illness when he was declared to be terminally ill.He is a great motivation and a brilliant scientist.Even though he was physically challenged he became world’s one of the most successful scientists.

Falak pathan

May 30, 2018

My favourite scientist

May 28, 2018

He is really a great scientist

He is a really great scientist.

May 24, 2018

Such an inspiring story. Even after being diagnosed with ALS he never backed up.He is an inspiration to all young and old

May 23, 2018

He was more than a god

Manamita Datta

A legend! A great bow to him! Huge inspiration!!!

May 22, 2018

A great step further for science. Where the rules(laws) of physics is in followed. IS THE, BLACK HOLE ?️

He is very inspire to me

He was always inspire to me

He was very inspire to me.

May 21, 2018

The great humanity

He was a role model for everyone!

Saumya Gangwar

May 20, 2018

He’s a man of honor

Adarsh Goel

We will miss you mr. Hawking thank you for all your theories rest in piece thank you for being an inspiration for us!

Till end of his last breath .He fought for the country

May 19, 2018

He is the real challenger,motivator and winner

SHREYA CHATTERJEE

May 18, 2018

Thanks for your support its inspiring.

He is an inspiration for those who love challenges. He is an inspiration for those who want to excel in life.

Inspired me a lot From wheel chair to the beginning of world

RISHABH RAJ SINGH

May 16, 2018

He was a genius.

Manav Mahawar

It destroys the whole Galaxy. It proves that nothing is impossible.

It is destroy the whole Galaxy and it prove that nothing is impossible.

He was the king of physics and will always be??

Praise Chandra mouli

May 15, 2018

He was a great personality and I think that he was a great inspiration for all of us.All of us can follow his footsteps to get the success.

He was the man who defeated death by the brain

Disability can never stop us for to be successful if u have determination to do something . it’s really very inspirational

May 14, 2018

He is true inspiration for everyone who really work hard to reach their goals n he has proven nobody is disabled but everyone are specially able… He is a great person

He is something more than a creation because he is a creator

Reeta Maria Rexon

May 13, 2018

He was a genius never to be forgotten …

May 12, 2018

While reading this article I never get bored

he proved that there is no god in the universe and a great motivation for us…..

I have no words to say

he got 19 awards in science and it is a normal thing definitely he left a path for us to discover more things though he is not alive, but still he lives in science, which doesn’t has end nor death

M.Prathyush

Thelegend who proved us difficulties have nothing to do with talent…. He crashed the barriers to instill the importance of hard work in our minds….may the maestro rest peacefully in his permanent sleep…..

Abhishek Kumar

I like all the blogs

May 11, 2018

Thank you BYJU’s for giving us a chance to know about Late Stephen Hawking…… It’s a pleasure to read about him……… Thanks a lot

Even though he is no more, he will live forever in our minds and hearts.

May 10, 2018

I think u could add more about the book BLACK HOLES It’s a Stephen Hawking book which I hope many people might not have read And about Stephen Hawking I don’t have words as he was my ideal and when he died I wore a white dress the whole day

He is an outstanding man who unleashed the mysteries of space and time from his wheelchair.

May 9, 2018

If hawking can achieve this in a negative health condition we should remember that we can achieve more than this

At his end he was noticed all around the world only as a scientist rather than a handicap

He was such a noble person who always deserves a name called “BORN GENIUS”

He is a big inspiration for my ambition

Tejas r gowda

A great personality and a great scientist. RIP Stephen Hawking.

Ashlesha Meshram

He was called Einstein in his school but he was not really interested in bookish knowledge instead he liked to open clocks and other machines to see how they work.It is really unique and also COOL.Isn’t it?

sunny kumar

he is one of the great face we had ever on our beautiful planet

This was good explanation of Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was a great scientists after discovering the black hole theory

What beautiful life has been spent by him.

Samriddhi Singh

He was very great and intelligent but also very brave as he worked hard to achieve his goals and gave all of us a message that where there is a will there is a way

May 8, 2018

An example of optimism. Didn’t let his disabilities disable him.

The facts are really amazing which Hawking sir said . He proved that nothing is impossible in this world

Sundaravadivelu

He is a great man of modern times who defied all odds against him. He is rolemodel for everyone.

Always inspiring and gives some motivation which is always immortal

shikha sarkar

more than an inspiration

He is literally a genius and he proved that he is an excellent inspiration.

Abhishek Munshi

Truly inspiring

great man he was

Sree parvathy

He was not only a legend in the world of physics but for the whole world.. what he did for us is limitless

He overcame all the hard barriers with a point of view of only his aim. A perfect motivation.

Truly a genius. One would have given up after such binding medical conditions but not one as determined as he was

May 7, 2018

Seriously he is an outstanding..

Vikalp shukla

Ya thanks byjus to providing us with a such useful and inspiring information.He was one of the greatest scientists of the world.

An Universal master in physics.

A salute to such a genius who made us know about such incredible thing “BLACK HOLE”

Chandrabala

Not for his genius discovery of black holes, he has shown that nothing is impossible if one dares to achieve against all odds

Bharath Binu Menon

A true symbol of human efficiency and productivity;his fetishism towards natural sciences and cosmology is unrivalled and undefeated. Although many of his critics claim his observations as divisive and blatant he is still a legendary scientist and excellent mathematician. I am really proud to say that I lived during his era.May God bless his Soul.

REST IN PEACE GREAT HAWKING!!!

Vatsal gupta

great fact about our genius Hawking and this big universe

Vinita kumari

He was not just a great scientist. He was a genius-hero .His invention were superb.

He was not just a great scientist. He was a genius-hero

VISHMARAJ DEY

inspiring and excellent information

His works and life are truly inspiring He is such an inspiration…

Biswajit Kabi

Sir, Stephen Hawking devotion towards Physics and his curiosity to know and find different things really inspire us. He will be always remember by the world.

Srihari Iyengar

He is a nice guy and has inspiring nature.

He is an inspiration for every physicists

Harsh Prashant Nalgirkar

He is one of the most satisfying and very inspirational scientist I have ever known.

He is an all time astrophysicist. He is a very good role model for all the students

Lovely. We miss Steven Hawkins. He is the real hero of science

Murtuzaali Surti

He was a Real Hero of science!

Suhasini rajan

It’s like a science fiction story. It’s really amazing dicovery.I’m Still wondering

Sahil Chauhan

This is the best app that i have ever use in my life. This app can help me to understand the things easily and simply this app can make me perfect in the learning…. So, i recommend this app to everyone…..

May 6, 2018

A man with different thinking more than man a god of knowledge

Sweksha jaiswal

He was really amazing!

Anshuman Rathi

He was a great human or a great soul

The one who defied everything… GENIUS!!

Raj Krishna Choudhary

He is my guru. It’s hard to find guys like him Doing research like him is my dream not aim. RIP Stephen William great hawking

The man who lived his life without his body but only with his willpower & determination. When the world cares about looks, he changed the looks of the world.

Deeksha Yagnavalkya

Awesome facts!!!!!…

He is very inspiring man he is one of my favorite hero

Anantraj Saha

He should be awarded Nobel Prize not Only for what he discovered but also for his enthusiasm even after his Illness and hardship of life.

AKARSH MISHRA

We love you sir Hawking and miss you at this point of science acknowledgence.

He is a great inspiration for all of us

What an incredible man he is !!!!!

Stephen Hawking his a great

AYUSHI TIWARI

Though he was suffering from a disease then to he never thought of taking his steps back Great scientist great hawing…..

Deepu Dev T

Unified 3 main concepts in physics, Relativity Quantum theory Fermi dynamics.

Wow. He was also in search for a completely unified theory. Which explains the universe in a much better way.

Sreelakshmi

He is very inspiring. I really love his words, “There shall be no boundaries to human endeavour. However bad life may seem, there will be something to succeed at. Where there is life, there is hope.”

I salute professor Stephen Hawking but I think that EINSTEIN,GALILEO AND STEPHEN HAWKINS ARE CO RELATED WITH EACH OTHER

He was really great, a true inspiration and a big genius…..

He is the father of universe,space and time. I believe in his words “there is no need of a God because universe came itself in existence”.

Tushar solanki.

A salute to a quite man with a loud mind.He is no more but his ideas are still alive….. Salute ☺️☺️??.

Sir Stephen Hawking proved that if you have a strong will to achieve a goal No force can stop you till you achieve your goal

Disha patil

Stephen Hawking is an inspiration for all of us. Though he had a disease at an early age he did not give up and discovered very interesting things. He is like the God of physics.?

Nidhi Mundhada

Sir Stephen Hawking undoubtedly proved that circumstances do come in life, but challenging them and moving forward at the same time is the truth of life…….

Purnima baghel

Greatest scientist ever like Einstein and Worth nobel prize…

Very Inspiring !

I think he is Second name of successful. He is one of the bst example and inspiration for future of this world.

Ranvir Sharma

Such a brilliant person who has devoted his life in the field of knowledge and understanding the universe

very very inspiring.

Inspiring. He proved that nothing is impossible if one works with dedication, determination and devotion. Hats off man!!!?

He was such a inspirational person that made nothing is impossible…he will remain forever in our hearts.?

Anjali Chugh

We can’t deny that he opened path for many challenges

He was an extraordinary man.

He is literally a genius

April 23, 2018

Inspiring but his views are so general to be challenged easily , but again it’s hard cuz they seem right at the same time .

April 9, 2018

he proved that nothing is impossible !

April 4, 2018

He is an inspiration for us.

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 MacTutor

Stephen william hawking.

I got an education there that was as good as, if not better than, that I would have had at Westminster. I have never found that my lack of social graces has been a hindrance.

The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a grey man - the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.

... although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found to my surprise that I was enjoying life in the present more than I had before. I began to make progress with my research...

... I therefore started working for the first time in my life. To my surprise I found I liked it.

... that both time and space are finite in extent, but they don't have any boundary or edge. ... there would be no singularities, and the laws of science would hold everywhere, including at the beginning of the universe.

I was in Geneva, at CERN, the big particle accelerator, in the summer of 1985 . ... I caught pneumonia and was rushed to hospital. The hospital in Geneva suggested to my wife that it was not worth keeping the life support machine on. But she was having none of that. I was flown back to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, where a surgeon called Roger Grey carried out a tracheotomy. That operation saved my life but took away my voice.

While many prominent physicists, cosmologists and astronomers have made important contributions to the study of quantum gravity and cosmology, the impact of Stephen Hawking's contributions to the field truly stand out. Although his work on black hole thermodynamics is perhaps the most well known, Hawking has also made major contributions to the study of singularity theorems in general relativity, black hole uniqueness, quantum fields in curved spacetimes, Euclidean quantum gravity, the wave function of the universe and many other areas as well. In addition to his own work, Hawking has served as advisor and mentor to a remarkable set of students. Furthermore, it would be hard to imagine assembling any list of researchers working in quantum cosmology without including a large number of Hawking's students and close colleagues. Thus the group that gathered at the CMS in Cambridge in honour of his 60 th birthday includes some of the leading theorists in the field.

... for boldness and creativity in gravitational physics, best illustrated by the prediction that black holes should emit black body radiation and evaporate, and for the special gift of making abstract ideas accessible and exciting to experts, generalists, and the public alike.

Stephen Hawking has contributed as much as anyone since Einstein to our understanding of gravity. This medal is a fitting recognition of an astonishing research career spanning more than 40 years.

Stephen Hawking is a definitive hero to all of us involved in exploring the Cosmos. His contribution to science is unique and he serves as a continuous inspiration to every thinking person. It was an honour for the crew of the STS- 121 mission to fly his medal into space. We think that this is particularly appropriate as Stephen has dedicated his life to thinking about the larger Universe.

This is a very distinguished medal. It was awarded to Darwin, Einstein and Crick. I am honoured to be in their company.

References ( show )

• Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-W-Hawking
• S Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays ( London, 1993) .

Additional Resources ( show )

Other pages about Stephen Hawking:

• Guardian obituary
• New York Times obituary
• Multiple entries in The Mathematical Gazetteer of the British Isles ,
• Miller's postage stamps

Other websites about Stephen Hawking:

• Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Stephen Hawking's home page
• A Google doodle
• Mathematical Genealogy Project
• MathSciNet Author profile
• zbMATH entry

Honours ( show )

Honours awarded to Stephen Hawking

• Lucasian Professor 1979
• LMS Naylor Prize 1999
• Copley Medal 2006
• Google doodle 2022

Cross-references ( show )

• History Topics: A history of time: 20 th century time
• History Topics: The development of the 'black hole' concept
• Societies: Pontifical Academy of Sciences
• Other: 2009 Most popular biographies
• Other: Cambridge Colleges
• Other: Cambridge Individuals
• Other: Cambridge professorships
• Other: Jeff Miller's postage stamps
• Other: London Museums
• Other: Most popular biographies – 2024
• Other: Oxford Institutions and Colleges
• Other: Oxford individuals
• Other: Popular biographies 2018

January 6, 2012

Stephen Hawking, "Equal to Anything!" [Excerpt]

A new biography of Stephen Hawking by long-time acquaintance Kitty Ferguson explores the famous physicist's life and theories in honor of his 70th birthday

By Kitty Ferguson

Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from the chapter "Equal to Anything!" from the new book Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), by Kitty Ferguson .  

When Stephen Hawking was twelve years old, two of his schoolmates made a bet about his future. John McClenahan bet that Stephen "would never come to anything"; Basil King, that he would "turn out to be unusually capable." The stake was a bag of candy. Young S. W. Hawking was no prodigy. Some reports claim he was brilliant in a haphazard way, but Hawking remembers that he was just another ordinary English schoolboy, slow learning to read, his handwriting the despair of his teachers. He ranked no more than halfway up in his school class, though he now says, in his defense, "It was a very bright class." Maybe someone might have predicted a career in science or engineering from the fact that Stephen was intensely interested in learning the secrets of how things such as clocks and radios work. He took them apart to find out, but he could seldom reassemble them. Stephen was never well-coordinated physically, not keen on sports or other physical activities, and almost always the last to be chosen for any sports team. John McClenahan had good reason to think he would win the wager.

Basil King probably was just being a loyal friend or liked betting on long shots. Maybe he did see things about Stephen that teachers, parents and Stephen himself couldn't see. He hasn't claimed his bag of sweets, but it's time he does. Because Stephen Hawking, after such an unexceptional beginning, is now one of the intellectual giants of our modern world—and among its most heroic figures. How such transformations happen is a mystery that biographical details alone cannot explain. Hawking would have it that he is still "just a child who has never grown up. I still keep asking these how and why questions. Occasionally I find an answer."

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1942–1959 Stephen William Hawking was born during the Second World War, on January 8, 1942, in Oxford. It was a winter of discouragement and fear, not a happy time to be born. Hawking likes to recall that his birth was exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo, who is called the father of modern science. But few people in January 1942 were thinking about Galileo.

Stephen's parents, Frank and Isobel Hawking, were not wealthy. Frank's very prosperous Yorkshire grandfather had over-extended himself buying farm land and then gone bankrupt in the great agricultural depression of the early twentieth century. His resilient wife, Frank's grandmother and Stephen's great-grandmother, saved the family from complete ruin by opening a school in their home. Her ability and willingness to take this unusual step are evidence that reading and education must already have been a high priority in the family.

Isobel, Stephen's mother, was the second oldest of seven children. Her father was a family doctor in Glasgow. When Isobel was twelve, they moved to Devon.

It wasn't easy for either family to scrape together money to send a child to Oxford, but in both cases they did. Taking on a financial burden of this magnitude was especially unusual in the case of Isobel's parents, for few women went to university in the 1930s. Though Oxford had been admitting female students since 1878, it was only in 1920 that the university had begun granting degrees to women. Isobel's studies ranged over an unusually wide curriculum in a university where students tended to be much more specialized than in an American liberal arts college or university. She studied economics, politics and philosophy.

Stephen's father Frank was a meticulous, determined young man who kept a journal every day from the age of fourteen and would continue it all his life. He was at Oxford earlier than Isobel, studying medical science with a specialty in tropical medicine. When the Second World War broke out he was in East Africa doing field research, and he intrepidly found his way overland to take ship for England and volunteer for military service. He was assigned instead to medical research.

Isobel held several jobs after graduation from Oxford, all of them beneath her ability and credentials as a university graduate. One was as an inspector of taxes. She so loathed that work that she gave it up in disgust to become a secretary at a medical institute in Hampstead. There she met Frank Hawking. They were married in the early years of the war.

In January 1942 the Hawkings were living in Highgate, North London. In the London area hardly a night passed without air raids, and Frank and Isobel Hawking decided Isobel should go to Oxford to give birth to their baby in safety. Germany was not bombing Oxford or Cambridge, the two great English university towns, reputedly in return for a British promise not to bomb Heidelberg and Göttingen. In Oxford, the city familiar from her recent university days, Isobel spent the final week of her pregnancy first in a hotel and then, as the birth grew imminent and the hotel grew nervous, in the hospital, but she was still able to go out for walks to fill her time. On one of those leisurely winter days, she happened into a bookshop and, with a book token, bought an astronomical atlas. She would later regard this as a rather prophetic purchase.  

Reprinted from Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind , by Kitty Ferguson, by arrangement with Palgrave Macmillan. Copyright © 2012, by Kitty Ferguson.

Stephen Hawking

• Occupation: Scientist and astrophysicist
• Born: January 8, 1942 in Oxford, United Kingdom
• Died: March 14, 2018 in Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Best known for: Hawking radiation and the book A Brief History of Time

• He was born on the 300th anniversary of the death of the famous scientist Galileo .
• He has been married twice and has three children.
• Stephen has been on several TV shows including The Simpsons and the Big Bang Theory .
• The book A Brief History of Time only has one equation, Einstein's famous E = mc 2 .
• Hawking has co-written several children's books with his daughter Lucy including George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt and George and the Big Bang .
• He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
• He hoped to travel to space one day and trained with NASA on their zero gravity aircraft.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

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Portraits of Stephen Hawking: a visual biography

Posted 28 Aug 2020, by Scott Jordan Harris

In the mid-1980s, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a series of pictures intended to raise the profiles of some contemporary British scientists who were prominent in their fields but little known to the public. One of these portraits, by Yolanda Sonnabend , was of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Stephen Hawking .

Stephen William Hawking 1985

Yolanda Sonnabend (1935–2015)

It was the first of several major portraits of the physicist that would be painted over the next 25 years. These pictures chart not only ordinary ageing but also the progress of Hawking's Motor Neurone Disease (MND), the degenerative condition otherwise known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). They also capture Hawking before, and at various stages of, the global fame that followed the publication of his bestselling book A Brief History of Time in 1988.

It's rare for a scientist to sit for so many important portraits, and even rarer for a disabled person to do so, and considered together the pictures form a compelling visual biography.

The Sonnabend portrait, painted in 1985, shows Hawking in his early 40s. In contrast to many notable paintings of disabled people – L. S. Lowry's The Cripples , for example – the focus is not on the misery supposedly inflicted by his impairments but on his status as a scientist.

The Cripples 1949

Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887–1976)

There appear to be unfinished equations on the blackboard behind him and we feel that perhaps we have interrupted him at work. Hawking's youthful appearance makes him seem like someone at the beginning of his career – even though, at the time the picture was painted, he had already been appointed to one of the most prestigious posts in academia and had outlived doctors' initial predictions of his life expectancy by 20 years.

Diagnosed with MND in 1963, he had at first been given only a few years to live.

Unlike later pictures, painted after Hawking lost much of the movement in his neck, Paul Gopal-Chowdhury 's 1989 portrait shows Hawking sitting upright.

Professor Stephen William Hawking

Paul Gopal-Chowdhury (b.1949)

Fittingly for a work that hangs in Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, the professor looks at us as he might at students who want to ask him a question. He's ready to answer, his hand poised on the controller of the speech computer he had begun using in 1986.

This depiction of Hawking as alert, engaged and – crucially – ready to speak counteracts one of the most pervasive myths about him: that, because of the esoteric nature of the work that occupied his mind, and the extent of the disabilities that affected his body, he was separated from society and all but imprisoned in his own world.

When Hawking appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in 1992 , the programme's presenter, Sue Lawley, suggested that, unlike previous guests she'd interviewed, he already knew what it was like to be isolated from the rest of the human race.

It was an idea he rejected outright. A Brief History of Time – like Hawking's lectures and, indeed, like his appearance on Desert Island Discs – demonstrate that, far from being voiceless and alone, Hawking was a born communicator. Gopal-Chowdhury presents him as such.

Gopal-Chowdhury had painted Hawking before: the professor is one of 15 figures in the 1984 picture Fellows at Dessert , which also hangs at Gonville & Caius College.

Fellows at Dessert 1984

Hawking sits towards the back of the image, at the far left corner of the dining table, beside the college president. It's significant that Hawking is not immediately identifiable and that it takes us a moment to realise his chair is, in fact, a wheelchair. It's unusual to see a disabled person in art without attention being drawn to their disability. In Fellows at Dessert , Hawking is simply a disabled person shown among a group of professional peers.

In the popular imagination, Hawking was soon to soar above those peers. In 1993 he played a hologram of himself in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , beating holographic re-creations of Sir Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein in a hand of poker organised by the super-intelligent android Data.

In the 1995 Halloween episode of The Simpsons , Homer Simpson causes a rupture in space-time and wails 'I wish I read that book by that wheelchair guy'.

By the mid-1990s, just ten years after Yolanda Sonnabend had painted him as a relatively obscure scientist, Hawking had become so synonymous with science, with genius, and with disability that the writers of The Simpsons could call him 'that wheelchair guy' and be assured their audience would know who they meant, while the writers of Star Trek could credibly assert that Hawking would still be regarded as one of 'the greatest minds in history' 300 years in the future.

When Hawking sat for a portrait by Frederick Cuming in 2005, he was as well-known as any scientist since Einstein.

Stephen William Hawking 2005

Frederick Cuming (1930–2022)

Looking at Cuming's picture – which, like Sonnabend's, is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery – we feel we have caught Hawking in a private moment. Unlike the straight-ahead focus of his eyes in the Gopal-Chowdhury picture, here he is intently looking away. This is a painting that compels us to wonder what its subject is thinking, which allows it to play with stereotypes about disability. Once we try to imagine what Stephen Hawking could be thinking, our focus is not on the limitations of his body compared to ours, but on the limitations of our minds compared to his.

Tai-Shan Schierenberg 's portrait of Hawking was painted in 2008, the year Hawking stopped using his hand to control his speech synthesiser and began using muscles in his cheek .

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) 2008

Tai-Shan Schierenberg (b.1962)

In the picture, which is held by the Royal Society, we see that he has lost some of the ability to make easily interpretable facial expressions.

At first, the viewer might think that this painting, like the one by Cuming, shows Hawking deep in thought. Or even that it shows him lost in that abject isolation it's widely believed his MND imposed upon him. But when we look at his eyes we see they are looking directly at us, as alert as they are in the Gopal-Chowdhury portrait from 19 years earlier. Again, we could be students looking to him for insights. In a sense, by 2008, the whole world was.

As Hawking became more and more renowned, his image in the media was – both metaphorically and literally – drawn in broad strokes. His scientific work had to be reported in reductive ways to make sense to the average person, but reductive ideas about him often led to reductive ideas about his disabilities. When Hawking died in 2018, numerous newspaper and internet cartoons were devoted to his death, with some crassly showing him walking away from his wheelchair in ways that proved immediately controversial among many of us who use wheelchairs .

The implication in these simple cartoons often seemed to be that a death that let someone 'walk free' was preferable to life in a wheelchair.

The portraits by Sonnabend, Gopal-Chowdhury, Cuming and Schierenberg stand in contrast to such simplistic pictures. Their great value is in their commitment to depicting both Hawking and disability with nuance and depth.

Scott Jordan Harris, arts journalist

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Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. At the time of his death on March 14, 2018, he was the director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world. During his lifetime, Hawking made revolutionary contributions to our understanding of the nature of the universe.

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