Physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76

Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and black-hole 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 adult 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 black holes emit radiation and later evaporate. He also showed the universe had a beginning by describing how Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity eventually breaks down when time and space are traced back to the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago.

“Stephen’s remarkable combination of boldness, vision, insight and courage have enabled him to produce ideas that have transformed our understanding of space and time, black holes and the origin of the universe,” James Hartle, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in 2002.

“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.

Often referred to as “one of the most unread books of all time” for the hard-to-grasp concepts, it included only one equation: E = mc2 or the equivalence of mass and energy, deduced by Einstein from his theory of special relativity. The book outlined the basics of cosmology for the general reader.

Hawking’s fame increased as his health worsened. 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 lifesaving tracheotomy in 1985 took away his ability to speak.

Associated Press file photo Professor Stephen Hawking smiles during a news in 1999. Hawking died Wednesday. He was 76.