A LIGHT GOES OUT IN THE UNIVERSE AS COSMOLOGY’S BRIGHTEST STAR DIES
Prof Stephen Hawking – ‘one of the greats’ – passed away at his home in Cambridge, UK, aged 76
A thousand years from now, scientists will still be discussing the work of Stephen Hawking, the British astrophysicist who changed the way humanity views the cosmos.
The University of Cambridge professor was a man of mind-boggling achievements – far more than a dusty scientist who studied the Universe.
Brian Cox, the British physicist and professor, called him “one of the greats”, saying physicists in 1,000 years’ time “will still be talking about Hawking radiation”, his theory about black holes.
Hawking, 76, died peacefully at home in Cambridge, his family said yesterday, leaving behind a generation of young scientists inspired by the depth and breadth of his achievements.
He was lauded for his book,
A Brief History of Time – an unusual addition to the best-seller lists – and was the first physicist to set out a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics.
As a young graduate student in the 1960s, he showed that Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity broke down completely at the birth of the Universe. He went on to discover hidden links between gravity, quantum theory – the rules of the sub-atomic world – and thermodynamics, originally devised to understand steam engines.
In the process, Hawking showed that black holes – bizarre objects whose intense gravity was supposed to trap everything within them – can actually emit heat.
Born in Oxford, England in 1942, Hawking read physics at the University of Oxford – to the dismay of his father, who wanted him to study medicine. He bored easily, however, and told examiners that if they awarded him a first, he would go to the University of Cambridge. Hawking was working on a PhD in cosmology in Cambridge when doctors discovered that he was suffering from motor neurone disease and gave him two years to live. Hawking then set to work on a PhD exposing the limits of Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Later in his career, Hawking predicted the end of humanity from global warming, a new virus or a large comet, and believed it was rational to assume there was intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe.
The scientist’s personal life was as complex as his scientific work. He met his first wife, Jane Wilde, in 1963 before he was told he had a disease that would confine him to a wheelchair. They had three children and divorced. He began a relationship with his nurse, Elaine Mason, who he married in 1995 and divorced in 2006 amid allegations of abuse Hawking denied.
Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim, called him an extraordinary man whose courage, persistence, brilliance and humour inspired people around 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,” his children said.
His exceptional contributions to scientific knowledge and the popularisation of science and mathematics left an indelible legacy, University of Cambridge vice chancellor Stephen Toope said: “His character was an inspiration to millions.” The film The Theory of Everything, released in 2014, illustrated the tension in Hawking’s private and professional lives and garnered a best actor Academy Award for star Eddie Redmayne.
Redmayne was among those paying tribute to Hawking yesterday, calling him “a truly beautiful mind, an astonishing scientist and the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet”.
Maj Timothy Nigel Peake, a British Army Air Corps officer and European Space Agency astronaut, said he inspired generations “to look beyond our own blue planet” and expand the understanding of the Universe.
“A star just went out in the cosmos,” Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist and theoretical physicist, tweeted. “We have lost an amazing human being.”
After being given two years to live, Hawking set to work on a PhD exposing the limits of Einstein’s theory of gravity
Stephen Hawking once said: “However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there is life, there is hope.” The world-renowned British physicist, who died yesterday aged 76, was the living embodiment of that sentiment. Born 300 years to the day after the death of Galileo Galilei, the architect of modern science, Hawking overcame extraordinary adversity to triumph in his field. It was in 1963 that the physics student was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given two years to live. He would defy the odds, living for a further five decades, though confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak unaided. While a weaker person may have struggled to find purpose, Hawking never wavered, breaking new ground on his mission to understand the universe and its origins. “My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21,” he famously remarked. “Everything since then has been a bonus.” His force of will is an inspiration to us all.
Hawking found renown among his colleagues for his groundbreaking research uniting the study of space and time with quantum theory – the behaviour of the smallest particles – to prize insights about cosmology, time and space. His “theory of everything”, after which an acclaimed recent film about him is named, sought to establish well-defined laws that govern the universe. Outside the scientific community, Hawking is legendary for popularising complex scientific theories and delighting ordinary people with their magic, filling auditoriums with his impassioned lectures on cosmology. A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, is one of the highest selling science books of all time, while Hawking’s trademark synthetic voice has attracted its own cult following. Determined to inspire interest in space travel, in 2007 he became the first quadriplegic to experience weightlessness in a zero-gravity simulator.
But despite his remarkable mind, like all humans Hawking was flawed. He shocked friends and family in 1995 when he divorced his wife, who had cared for him for two decades, before marrying one of his nurses. The fallibility of this genius offers an important message for young people in a world where the famous take pains to sanitise their public profiles. Aware of the platform his fame afforded, he never shied away from controversy, reportedly rejecting a knighthood in the 90s over UK government science funding. More recently he criticised the populist rebellion that saw the Brexit vote and the election of US President Donald Trump. But ultimately it was Hawking’s scientific achievement in the face of indescribable adversity that made him extraordinary. He will rightly go down in history as one of the greatest and most inspirational minds of his generation.