Giant of theoretical physics also grounded in pop culture
Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists, has died at age 76. On the cover of the Oxford Dictionary of Scientists, Hawking appeared with Einstein and Madame Curie, an apt demonstration of his renown.
For decades, Hawking was confined to a wheelchair by a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a neurological disease that handcuffs movement. He communicated via a speech synthesizer. A cause of death was not immediately available. His family announced his death in a statement early Wednesday.
Hawking was best known as the author of A Brief History of Time, the bestselling 1988 book that brought modern astrophysics into popular understanding. His comments on black holes and other phenomena were regularly noted in newspapers. The Simpsons featured him in one of its cartoon episodes. He was featured in Big Bang Theory, as a hero to one of the sitcom’s main characters, theoretical physicist Sheldon Cooper.
His book The Grand Design, co-written with Caltech’s Leonard Mlodinow, again attracted readers, as well as controversy, with its claim that cosmology showed God was unnecessary to the creation of the universe.
“His public image could not have occurred without the media. With his participation, they shaped and molded it,” American University science writing professor Declan Fahy wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review on Hawking’s 70th birthday in 2012. “This has led to tensions within his field. Other physicists have been, at times, ambivalent about his reputation.”
But Hawking’s popularity rested on genuine achievement, remarkable strides in understanding black holes and the origin of the universe, Fahy noted, starting with a 1974 paper titled “Black hole explosion?” published in the journal Nature. “Hawking radiation,” the emission of heat from black holes, is
“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”
Stephen Hawking, 1989
now accepted as a fundamental and unexpected concept in physics, one that solved a puzzle of how these imploded stars could exist and be theoretically reconciled with conventional understanding of energy. He showed that black holes served as cosmic laboratories for sorting out Einstein’s theory of gravity with the “quantum” theories of electromagnetic and nuclear forces that has divided physics for decades.
He also excelled at encouraging other researchers, famously betting his theories against those of others. Hawking conceded one such bet in 2004. He admitted that his theory, created in collaboration with physicist Kip Thorne, that black holes may remove information entirely from the universe by pulling everything including light down its gravitational maw, was probably wrong. He delivered a baseball encyclopedia to American physicist John Preskill as the price for losing his wager. (Thorne did not concede.)
Born in Oxford, England, Hawking graduated from Oxford University and later Cambridge University. He was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics there in 1979, a position once held by Isaac Newton. He is survived by his three children, Robert, Lucy and Timothy, from his first marriage. His second marriage, to Jane Hawking, ended in 2006, a subject of tabloid news stories.
Despite his physical frailty, he was known for a direct and dry wit, often combining the marvelous and mundane. “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star,” he told Der Spiegel in 1989. “But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.”