The world’s most celebrated scientist Professor Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76 – more than 50 years after he was given just two years to live.
The famed theoretical physicist passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge this morning after a long battle with motor neurone disease, his family has revealed.
His 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.
‘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’.
They also praised their father’s ‘courage and persistence’ that inspired people from across the world, and a recent poll voted him the 25th greatest Briton of all time.
Professor Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 when he was 21 and he defied medical experts who said he would be dead within two years.
In the following 55 years he became the world’s most famous scientist since Albert Einstein for his work exploring the mysteries of space, time and black holes despite being wheelchair-bound and only able to communicate using his famous voice synthesizer.
His most famous book ‘A Brief History of Time’ became an international bestseller with more than 10million copies sold – although the physicist joked himself that many who owned it never finished it and more struggled to understand its complexity.
The Cambridge-based scientist, who married twice, embraced popular culture appearing in The Simpsons, The Big Bang Theory, Star Trek and was immortalised in the Oscar-winning biopic The Theory of Everything, where he was played by Eddie Redmayne.
He said he embraced popular culture because he wanted to make science more mainstream and encourage the world to ‘look up at the stars and not down at your feet’.
Hawking’s most famous works included a mathematical model for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and the nature of the universe such as The Big Bang and Black Holes.
He wrote or co-wrote 15 books overall.
Dr Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England.
His family had moved to Oxford from north London to escape the threat of World War II rockets.
When he was 8, they moved St. Albans, a town about 20 miles north of the capital, where he would attend St Albans School and later University College, Oxford where his father attended.
His prodigious talent and unorthodox study methods meant he used few books and made no notes but could still solve problems like no other students.
He wanted to study mathematics but the subject was not available at the college so he chose physics instead.
In 1962, he went to the University of Cambridge’s Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics to conduct research in cosmology.
In 1965, he received his PhD with his thesis ‘Properties of Expanding Universes’ and would soon publish his first academic book ‘The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time’.
At the age of 21, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a nerve system disease that weakens muscles and impacts physical function.
But he continued his scientific work, appeared on television and married for a second time.
As one of Isaac Newton’s successors as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Hawking was involved in the search for the great goal of physics — a ‘unified theory.’
Such a theory would resolve the contradictions between Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of gravity that govern the motion of large objects like planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the world of subatomic particles.
For Hawking, the search was almost a religious quest — he said finding a ‘theory of everything’ would allow mankind to ‘know the mind of God.’
He wrote in ‘A Brief History of Time’ that ‘a complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence.’
In later years, though, he suggested a unified theory might not exist.
He followed up in the book in 2001 with the more accessible sequel, ‘The Universe in a Nutshell,’ updating readers on concepts like super gravity, naked singularities and the possibility of an 11-dimensional universe.
Hawking said belief in a God who intervenes in the universe ‘to make sure the good guys win or get rewarded in the next life’ was wishful thinking.
‘But one can’t help asking the question: Why does the universe exist?’ he said in 1991. ‘I don’t know an operational way to give the question or the answer, if there is one, a meaning. But it bothers me.’
The combination of his best-selling book and his almost total disability — for a while he could use a few fingers, later he could only tighten the muscles on his face — made him one of science’s most recognizable faces.
He made cameo television appearances in ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Star Trek’ and counted among his fans U2 guitarist The Edge, who attended a January 2002 celebration of Hawking’s 60th birthday.
His early life was chronicled in the 2014 film ‘The Theory of Everything,’ with Eddie Redmayne winning the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the scientist. The film focused still more attention on Hawking’s remarkable achievements.
Some colleagues credited that celebrity with generating new enthusiasm for science.
His achievements and his longevity helped prove to many that even the most severe disabilities need not stop patients from living.
Richard Green, of the Motor Neurone Disease Association — the British name for ALS — said Hawking met the classic definition of the disease, as ‘the perfect mind trapped in an imperfect body.’ He said Hawking had been an inspiration to people with the disease for many years.
Although it could take him minutes to compose answers to even simple questions Hawking said the disability did not impair his work.
It certainly did little to dampen his ambition to physically experience space himself: Hawking savored small bursts of weightlessness in 2007 when he was flown aboard a jet that made repeated dives to simulate zero-gravity.
Hawking had hoped to leave Earth’s atmosphere altogether someday, a trip he often recommended to the rest of the planet’s inhabitants.
‘In the long run the human race should not have all its eggs in one basket, or on one planet,’ Hawking said in 2008. ‘I just hope we can avoid dropping the basket until then.’
Hawking first earned prominence for his theoretical work on black holes. Disproving the belief that black holes are so dense that nothing could escape their gravitational pull, he showed that black holes leak a tiny bit of light and other types of radiation, now known as ‘Hawking radiation.’
‘It came as a complete surprise,’ said Gary Horowitz, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. ‘It really was quite revolutionary.’
Horowitz said the find helped move scientists one step closer to cracking the unified theory.
Hawking’s other major scientific contribution was to cosmology, the study of the universe’s origin and evolution. Working with Jim Hartle of the University of California, Santa Barbara, Hawking proposed in 1983 that space and time might have no beginning and no end.
‘Asking what happens before the Big Bang is like asking for a point one mile north of the North Pole,’ he said.
Daily Mail
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