Illness get in the way of his search for answers

who was dying of leukaemia, Hawking wrote in his 2013 autobiography My Brief History.

At the unusually young age of 32, Hawking was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious academic institution.

In 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University — the same post once held by Isaac Newton.

He became one of the world’s greatest experts on gravity and black holes — places where matter is compressed to the point where the normal laws of space and time break down. He linked gravity and quantum theory and made the startling discovery that, under certain conditions, black holes can emit subatomic particles.

Until that point, it had been assumed that absolutely nothing, not even light, could escape from a black hole. The particles emitted by an evaporating black hole became known as Hawking Radiation.

Hawking said that when he wrote A Brief History of Time in the late 1980s, he believed that mankind would “one day know the mind of God”. In his 2010 book The Grand Design, Hawking asserted that there was no need for a creator to explain the existence of the universe.

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” he said on its publication.

Hawking received countless honours, including an OBE award from Queen Elizabeth II in 1982, but never won the coveted Nobel Prize.

In 1965, and already a sick man, Hawking married his first wife, Jane Wilde, with whom he had three children.

In his autobiography, Hawking, who habitually avoided talking about his private life, revealed how Jane became depressed due to the stress of caring for him and the fear that he was going to die.

With his tacit approval she began an affair with a musician in the late 1980s, while Hawking fell in love with one of his nurses, Elaine Mason.

After 25 years of marriage the couple split, with Jane commenting that in contrast to Hawking’s saintly image, fame had gone to his head and her role had become solely one of telling him “that he was not God”. Hawking married Mason in 1995. That relationship also ended in divorce after 12 years, though only after a police investigation into accusations that Mason had physically abused her husband.

Hawking’s life was the subject of the 2014 film A Theory of Everything, in which he was played by Eddie Redmayne.

As well as pushing the boundaries of scientific knowledge, Hawking campaigned tirelessly for the disabled.

His own health steadily worsened, and for the last few years of his life Hawking was permanently on a ventilator. — dpa the 65-year-old former Exxon Mobil chief executive. The tensions peaked last year amid reports Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” and considered resigning. Tillerson never denied using the word.

Analysts said the changes could sow more instability in the volatile Trump Administration and marked the departure of another moderate who sought to emphasise Washington’s strong ties to its allies amid Trump’s criticism.

Evans Revere, a former senior US diplomat who dealt with North Korea under President George W. Bush, said Trump’s move sends “a bad signal about the role of diplomacy”. “Tillerson’s replacement by ... Pompeo, who is known as a political partisan and an opponent of the Iran agreement, raises the prospect of the collapse of that deal, and increases the possibility that the Administration might soon face not one, but two nuclear crises,” he said.

Trump later told reporters: “We got along actually quite well but we disagreed on things. When you look at the Iran deal: I think it’s terrible, I guess he thinks it was OK. I wanted to break it or do something, and he felt a little bit differently.”

Trump said he and Pompeo have “a similar thought process”.

Pompeo is a former army officer who represented a Kansas district in the House of Representatives before taking the CIA job. — Reuters