Stephen Hawking’s star illuminated our universe

Seated motionless in his wheelchair in the English city of Cambridge, Stephen Hawking traversed the cosmos.

Transported by an exceptionally fertile mind rather than a rocket ship, the world’s most famous physicist spent more than a half century exploring the beguiling mysteries of black holes, gravity, quantum theory and trying to figure out why there is something instead of nothing at all.

In doing this in the face of physical adversities that would have floored many people, Hawking, who died Wednesday at the age of 76, taught an entranced world not only about the marvellous universe around us, but the infinitely remarkable universe inside our own human brains.

For all this, humanity is indebted to him.

Few people, Hawking included, could have predicted his life would turn out this way and achieve so much when, at the age of just 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a degenerative disease that eats away at the nervous system.

It was a death sentence. A graduate student in cosmology at the University of Cambridge, Hawking was told he had two years to live.

His response? Full speed ahead.

Hawking became one of the world’s greatest and most renowned scientists — even as ALS inexorably destroyed his ability to move and, finally, even talk without a mechanical aid.

Immobilized, he needed others to carry him from place to place. In his final years, he communicated by twitching the muscles under his right eye to painstakingly articulate his thoughts through a custom-built computer.

But his mind was undiminished. It became his principal laboratory.

Perhaps his scientific triumph came with his prediction that black holes — regions of space with intense gravitational fields — emit radiation and can slowly evaporate over time.

He also expanded in profound ways our understanding of how the universe was born.

As a professor, he inspired and mentored generations of physicists.

Hawking was also a natural communicator committed to explaining complex scientific concepts to the masses.

His greatest achievement in this cause was his 1988 bestseller, “A Brief History of Time,” a book on cosmology aimed at the general public.

Canadians can treasure the special bond Hawking forged with this country.

Over the course of his visits to southern Ontario, Hawking raised the international profile of Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo.

Hawking’s endorsements of the two research centres gave them international credibility and helped them attract top scientific talent from around the world. He also collaborated with Perimeter Institute researchers and students.

We live in an era of cinematic superheroes, costumed actors with impossibly sculpted bodies who are often endowed, on screen, with superhuman powers. Hawking’s body was a wreck.

But he was an authentic hero for our time.

Faced with an unconquerable foe in the form of ALS, Hawking fought on with courage, humour and wisdom — and without a trace of self-pity.

Until the very end, he won.

Death cannot deny that legacy.

Illness can disable a body.

It need not disable a life.