STEPHEN HAWKING DIES AT 76

The physicist and author of A Brief History of Time has died at his home in Cambridge. His children said: ‘We will miss him for ever’

Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76.


His family released a statement in the early hours of Wednesday morning confirming his death at his home in Cambridge.

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.”

For fellow scientists and loved ones, it was Hawking’s intuition and wicked sense of humour that marked him out as much as the fierce intellect that, coupled with his illness, came to symbolise the unbounded possibilities of the human mind.

Hawking was driven to Wagner, but not the bottle, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the age of 21. Doctors expected him to live for only two more years. But Hawking had a form of the disease that progressed more slowly than usual. He survived for more than half a century.

Hawking once estimated he worked only 1,000 hours during his three undergraduate years at Oxford. In his finals, he came borderline between a first- and second-class degree. Convinced that he was seen as a difficult student, he told his viva examiners that if they gave him a first he would move to Cambridge to pursue his PhD. Award a second and he threatened to stay. They opted for a first.

Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most. For Hawking, the early diagnosis of his terminal disease, and witnessing the death from leukaemia of a boy he knew in hospital, ignited a fresh sense of purpose. “Although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to make progress with my research,” he once said. Embarking on his career in earnest, he declared: “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

He began to use crutches in the 1960s, but long fought the use of a wheelchair. When he finally relented, he became notorious for his wild driving along the streets of Cambridge, not to mention the intentional running over of students’ toes and the occasional spin on the dance floor at college parties.


Hawking’s first major breakthrough came in 1970, when he and Roger Penrose applied the mathematics of black holes to the universe and showed that a singularity, a region of infinite curvature in spacetime, lay in our distant past: the point from which came the big bang.

Penrose found he was able to talk with Hawking even as the latter’s speech failed. Hawking, he said, had an absolute determination not to let anything get in his way. “He thought he didn’t have long to live, and he really wanted to get as much as he could done at that time.”

In 1974 Hawking drew on quantum theory to declare that black holes should emit heat and eventually pop out of existence. For normal-sized black holes, the process is extremely slow, but miniature black holes would release heat at a spectacular rate, eventually exploding with the energy of a million one-megaton hydrogen bombs.

His proposal that black holes radiate heat stirred up one of the most passionate debates in modern cosmology. Hawking argued that if a black hole could evaporate, all the information that fell inside over its lifetime would be lost forever. It contradicted one of the most basic laws of quantum mechanics, and plenty of physicists disagreed. Hawking came round to believing the more common, if no less baffling, explanation that information is stored at a black hole’s event horizon, and encoded back into radiation as the black hole radiates.

Marika Taylor, a former student of Hawking’s and now professor of theoretical physics at Southampton University, remembers how Hawking announced his U-turn on the information paradox to his students. He was discussing their work with them in the pub when Taylor noticed he was turning his speech synthesiser up to the max. “I’m coming out!” he bellowed. The whole pub turned around and looked at the group before Hawking turned the volume down and clarified the statement: “I’m coming out and admitting that maybe information loss doesn’t occur.” He had, Taylor said, “a wicked sense of humour.”

Hawking’s run of radical discoveries led to his election in 1974 to the Royal Society at the young age of 32. Five years later, he became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, arguably Britain’s most distinguished chair, and a post formerly held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics.

Hawking’s seminal contributions continued through the 1980s. The theory of cosmic inflation holds that the fledgling universe went through a period of terrific expansion. In 1982, Hawking was among the first to show how quantum fluctuations – tiny variations in the distribution of matter – might give rise through inflation to the spread of galaxies in the universe. In these tiny ripples lay the seeds of stars, planets and life as we know it.

But it was A Brief History of Time that rocketed Hawking to stardom. Published for the first time in 1988, the title made the Guinness Book of Records after it stayed on the Sunday Times bestsellers list for an unprecedented 237 weeks. It sold 10m copies and was translated into 40 different languages. Nevertheless, wags called it the greatest unread book in history.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-professor-dies-aged-76

CNN Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA8GdJJqz_s

The great atheist is dead. Now he knows if God truly exists or not.

Actually, I have great respect for this guy- despite his non-faith in God per se. He has- had- an emblem of the resilience of human spirit w/ or w/o God factor.

He defied the odds of surviving past 2 years (per his disease) to 76 y/o confined to wheel chair by a neuro-degenerative diseases since age of 21 AND still he has gone on to contribute enormously in the field of science- theoretical/quantum physics.

I read his God delusion and Grand design books and he was often quoted in debates around college campuses. Great and fascinating theories of the origin of the universe. Very brilliant, inquisitive and creative mind.

I wonder if his ALS paralyzing disease led him to atheism. In any case, Great mind anyway and great example that physical limitations cannot cripple your mind too. Mind over matter, he certainly lived it.

RIP- I suppose now you can find out if you were correct in your theories of God and origin and design.

Xiadnat:
Actually, I have great respect for this guy- despite his non-faith in God per se. He has- had- an emblem of the resilience of human spirit w/ or w/o God factor.

He defied the odds of surviving past 2 years (per his disease) to 76 y/o confined to wheel chair by a neuro-degenerative diseases since age of 21 AND still he has gone on to contribute enormously in the field of science- theoretical/quantum physics.

I read his God delusion and Grand design books and he was often quoted in debates around college campuses. Great and fascinating theories of the origin of the universe. Very brilliant, inquisitive and creative mind.

I wonder if his ALS paralyzing disease led him to atheism. In any case, Great mind anyway and great example that physical limitations cannot cripple your mind too. Mind over matter, he certainly lived it.

RIP- I suppose now you can find out if you were correct in your theories of God and origin and design.

I like your last sentence. The issue is this: no matter how much 'contribution' a man makes to human civilization, what he makes of himself is still what matters the most.

In as much as he did those good things you mentioned above, his turning many minds away from belief in God is his greatest mistake. I know God exists. I know also he knows that right now. This man has done great harm to religion, exhalting science. What a wasted life!