Hawking’s brilliant mind, unique spirit unlocked our universe

In terms of grasping the complexities of black holes, singularities and other cosmic mysteries that theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking spent a lifetime unravelling, it’s fair to say that most people only understood a fraction of what the brilliant British mathematician was ever talking or writing about. Yet the culturally popular Hawking, who died Wednesday at age 76 at his home in Cambridge, nevertheless succeeded spectacularly in making the spirit behind such science both more appealing, and more widely accessible, than ever before. Hawking encouraged people’s desire to ask the big questions: Where did the universe begin? When did time start? Remarkably, Hawking became the most internationally recognized scientist since Albert Einstein while refusing to be held back by the constraints of space or time, represented by the limitations on his own movement due to his degenerative ALS and the fact doctors had told him he only had a few years to live back in his early 20s. Despite being confined to a wheelchair and losing his ability to move, save for a few facial muscles, or speak, for decades Hawking revolutionized our understanding of the universe, including what happened at the Big Bang. And he did it, for the most part, working out in his mind thorny physics problems that had previously defied resolution. He won almost every scientific honour available, wrote 15 books, including the wildly successful A Brief History of Time, and held several prestigious teaching engagements, including as one of the successors of Isaac Newton as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. In his personal life, he married twice and had three children, who on Wednesday paid tribute to their father’s courage, persistence, brilliance and humour. It was Hawking’s famed sense of humour that helped make him accessible to the average person. A towering intellect and monumental scientific figure, Hawking seemed to love having a laugh at his own expense. He appeared — speaking with that characteristic mechanical voice — as himself, sometimes in cartoon form, on shows from Star Trek: The Next Generation, to The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory. Hawking once drolly noted the dark side of his celebrity was that sunglasses and a wig didn’t help him go unrecognized, as his wheelchair always gave him away. “Life would be tragic, if it wasn’t so funny,” he said on another occasion. One of Hawking’s legacies will be that he demonstrated how even severe disabilities need not stop someone from achieving lofty goals. He also left us with his shared worries, and warnings, about what he perceived as threats to humanity’s survival. Climate change, asteroids, potentially unfriendly aliens and humanity’s own innate aggression concerned Hawking. He urged the colonization of space. But most of all, he’ll be remembered for expanding our universe, opening up new realms of human possibility and achievement while exploring scientific theory.