Famed physicist Hawking dies at 76
Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and blackhole theorist who brought science to a mass audience with the best-selling book “A Brief History of Time,” has died. He was 76.
Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge in England in the early hours of Wednesday morning, a spokesman for his family said in an emailed statement.
“We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today,” his children Lucy, Robert and Tim said in the statement. “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 humor 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.”
Hawking suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was confined to an electric wheelchair for much of his life. Diagnosed at age 21, he was one of the world’s longest survivors of ALS.
A Cambridge University professor, Hawking redefined cosmology by proposing that black holes emit radiation and later evaporate. He also showed that the universe had a beginning by describing how Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity eventually breaks down when time space are traced back to the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago.
A Brief History of Time,” first published in 1988, earned its author worldwide acclaim, selling at least 10 million copies in 40 languages and staying on the best-seller list of the U.K.’s Sunday Times newspaper for a record 237 weeks.
Hawking’s fame increased as his health worsadult ened. After his degenerative muscle disorder was diagnosed, he defied medical opinion by living five decades longer than expected. He communicated his ideas through an American-accented speech synthesizer after a life-saving tracheotomy in 1985 took away his ability to speak.
“To my colleagues, I’m just another physicist, but to the wider public, I beand came possibly the bestknown scientist in the world,” Hawking wrote in his 2013 memoir “My Brief History.” “This is partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius.”
Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Italian physicist Galileo Galilei. Hawking’s father, Frank, was a doctor of tropical medicine. His mother, Isobel, was a tax inspector and a secretary. He had two younger sisters and a brother.
At age 8, Hawking moved with his family to St. Albans, where he went to school. He then graduated with first-class honors in natural science at Oxford’s University College.