The University of Cambridge has confirmed that physicist Stephen Hawking, 76, died at his home in Cambridge during the early hours of March 14.
Dr. Hawking was born in 1942 in Oxford. He was diagnosed with ALS in 1963 while he was studying for his doctorate in cosmology at the University of Cambridge. He was only 21 years old, and the doctors told him that he had only a few years to live. That spurred him to learn as much as he could about the universe.
Hawking’s disease, however, progressed far more slowly than expected, and he survived for decades. While he accepted using crutches during the early stages of his disease, he resisted using a wheelchair. When he did start using a wheelchair, he became infamous for deliberately running over student’s toes and driving wildly along the Cambridge streets.
In 1970, Hawking made his first major discovery, when he and Roger Penrose applied the mathematics of black holes to the rest of the universe. By doing that, they demonstrated the existence of a region of infinite curvature in spacetime. It was nothing less than the origin of the Big Bang, and it became known as a singularity.
Four years later Hawking used quantum theory to argue that black holes produced heat and that those heat emissions eventually caused the black hole to shrink into nothingness. Hawking also proposed that disappearing black holes erased information – an idea that contradicted some of quantum theory’s basic tenets, as Hawking himself admitted.
During that same year, Hawking was elected to the Royal Society when he was only 32 years old. In 1979, he became the Lucasian mathematics professor at Cambridge. The post was arguably the most prestigious chair in Britain and has been held by such luminaries as Paul Dirac, Charles Babbage, and Isaac Newton.
It wasn’t until 1988 that Hawking became truly known to the general public. That year, he published “A Brief History of Time,” which stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a staggering 237 weeks.
Hawking’s health slowly continued to decline. In 1985, he developed a severe infection and needed to undergo a tracheotomy. While the operation saved his life, it destroyed his voice. He used a voice synthesizer for the rest of his life.
Hawking won a variety of scientific honors including the Fundamental Physics Prize, the Copley Medal, the Wolf Prize, and the Albert Einstein Award. He never won the Nobel Prize, possibly because his work was theoretical and difficult to prove through experimentation.
Hawking was married twice, and both marriages ended in divorce. He had three children by his first wife: Robert, Lucy, and Timothy.
