Prof’s legacy to test time
Science giant Hawking dead at 76
HE was trapped in a wheelchair.
But Professor Stephen Hawking was an explorer in every sense of the word, and through his thoughts, he opened up new worlds to humanity.
It would have been so easy for his life to slip into tragedy and despair. Instead, Prof Hawking overcame his debilitating life sentence and became a living treasure.
Now, after 76 years of broadening our understanding of the universe, he has passed into the realm of time he struggled so valiantly to comprehend.
His children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, said: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today ... 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.”
If you hadn’t seen or heard the wheelchair-bound, electronic-voiced genius on documentaries or the news, you’d probably know of him through the movie, The Theory of Everything.
Certainly, everybody who ever had anything to do with the mysteries of time and space knew him well. Not since Albert Einstein has anyone had the impact on the world of physics that Prof Hawking had.
He strove to discover how Einstein’s seminal theory of relativity, which defined the nature of space and time, meshed with quantum theory — the behaviour of the chaotic, tiny small building blocks of the universe.
It is mind-bending stuff, and Prof Hawking had the mind for it. But he had to beat the odds to apply it.
“Through it all, of course, his illness made his achievements near-superhuman,” said fellow astrophysicist and highprofile Swinburne University science communicator Alan Duffy. “How he manipulated Einstein’s equations in his mind when he could no longer hold a pen, I can’t even begin to imagine.”
In Prof Hawking’s words, he felt “somewhat of a tragic character” after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at age 21. He was given no more than five years to live. He lasted more than 50.
He married Jane Wilde. He had three children. And he published ideas that shook our understanding of the universe.
“Prof Hawking was an inspiration to me to become — not just a scientist — but a communicator of that science,” Dr Duffy said.
“He was also wonderfully funny with a fantastic media savviness that propelled him into A-list celebrity stardom as few other scientists before.”
Dr Duffy said it was Prof Hawking’s work on black-hole physics that made him a legend.
“His best-known prediction, named by the community as Hawking Radiation, transformed the black holes from inescapable gravitational prisons into objects that instead shrink and fade away over time,” he said.
Prof Hawking escaped the abyss of academia in 1988, with the publication of his first book, A Brief History of Time.
It made astrophysics understandable, and popular.