HAWKING LEFT GRAND LEGACY
Brilliant physicist dead at 76
Initially given two years to live, a diagnosis that threw him into a profound depression, he found the strength to complete his doctorate and rise to the position of Lucasian professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the same post held by Isaac Newton 300 years earlier.
Hawking eventually became one of the planet’s most renowned science popularizers, and he embraced the attention, travelling the world, visiting Antarctica and Easter Island, and flying on special “zero-gravity” jet whose parabolic flight let Hawking float as if he were in outer space.
“My goal is simple,” he once said. “It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” He spent much of his career searching for a way to reconcile Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum physics and produce a “Theory of Everything.”
He wrote an international bestseller, A Brief History of Time, which delved into the origin and ultimate fate of the universe. He deliberately set out to write a massmarket primer on an often incomprehensible subject.
Although the book was sometimes derided as being dense, and had a reputation for being owned more than read, it sold millions of copies, was translated into more than 20 languages, and inspired a mini-empire of similar books from Hawking.
With his daughter, Lucy, he wrote a series of children’s books about a young intergalactic traveller named George. His blunt 2013 memoir, My Brief History, explored his development in science as well as his turbulent marriages. In addition, Hawking was the subject of a 1991 documentary, A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris, and countless newspaper and magazine articles.
With the aid of a voice synthesizer, controlled by his fingers on a keyboard, he gave speeches around the world, from Chile to China. He played himself on such TV programs as Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Simpsons, the latter featuring Hawking telling the show’s lazy animated patriarch, “Your theory of a doughnut-shaped universe is interesting, Homer. I may have to steal it.”
He insisted that his reputation as the second coming of Albert Einstein had gotten out of control through “media hype.”
“I fit the part of a disabled genius,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1990. “At least, I’m disabled — even though I’m not a genius like Einstein . ... The public wants heroes. They made Einstein a hero, and now they’re making me a hero, though with much less justification.”
His scientific achievements included breakthroughs in understanding the extreme conditions of black holes, objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravity.