Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
A star has
TRIBUTES poured in from around the globe to the world’s most celebrated scientist, Professor Stephen Hawking, who died at home early yesterday, aged 76.
The l egend ar y phy sici st was remembered by l eading lights in science, the arts and politics, after his family announced his death.
His children Lucy, 47, Robert, 50, and Tim, 38, paid their own tribute and said: “He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years.
“His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across 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 forever.”
Prof Hawking was struck down with motor neurone disease in 1963 and given two years to live. He defied the doctors’ prognosis for more than half a century and became the world’s most famous scientist, building an incredible scientific legacy, while confined to a wheelchair and reliant on a voice synthesiser to communicate.
His 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time, sold more than 10 million copies in 20 years.
Tw i c e m a r r i e d a n d divorced, Hawking was known for his colourful personal life and mischievous sense of humour.
Eddie Redmayne, 36, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Hawking in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, said: “We have lost a truly beautiful mind, an astonishing scientist and the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet.”
Benedict Cumberbatch, 41, who starred as the professor in the BBC film, Hawking, said: “I feel so lucky to have known such a truly great man…”
Former US President Barack Obama wrote: “Hav e f un out there among the stars.”
Hawking refused to be limited by disability. He wrote: “In my dreams I ’m always able-bodied. Either I don’t want to admit to myself I’m disabled or I feel that by will alone, I can overcome it.” Former PA Judith Croasdell, 69, who worked with Hawking for 10 years, outlined his view on death. Speaking yesterday, she said: “Stephen felt the human mind was j ust like a computer and that some day t h e c o mput e r would be turned off. “He told me that he never regarded himself as disabled because he was free and liberated by his thoughts.”
She nicknamed the scientist “The Hawk” or “Old Rogue” and said: “He could be a naughty fellow and was a fighter, gung-ho in everything he did.
“But he was also very devoted to his grandchildren, he was thrilled he had three and that’s a side of him most people never saw.”
Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease while studying at Oxford. By the late 1970s, he was confined to a wheelchair, with only family members able to understand his speech. He later communicated
through his voice synthesiser, first controlling it with his fingers, and then with blinks and facial twitches.
Friends said in recent years communication became so slow sentences would take 30 minutes to “translate”.
In spite of his disabilities, Hawking developed a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics and discovered black holes leaked energy, a phenomenon dubbed “Hawking radiation”.
In the late 1990s, he turned down a knighthood in protest at the lack of Government funding for science. He never got the Nobel Prize, as many of