What’s a heaven for?

If there was a Mount Rushmore for intelligence, they’d likely be carving Stephen Hawking’s well-known visage in stone by now.

Then again, such Earth-bound homage would likely fail to adequately convey the vast imaginings of the renowned physicist, who died on Tuesday at 76.

Hawking left huge legacies in both his life and scholarship. Diagnosed at 22 with a rare form of motor neuron disease, he was given a short time to live. He beat those odds. In his work, he turned the unlikely trick of making black holes and relativity the subject of a global bestseller, A Brief History of Time.

Hawking sought to look beyond what could be seen in order to understand the universe. Even so, he said he almost cut from his book what become his bestknown proposition.

A so-called Theory of Everything, he said, “would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God.”

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of a man who both set himself that challenge and starred on The Simpsons. That sense of humour, along with his willpower and determination, were as inspirational as his brilliance.

“He was a fun-loving guy,” Prof. Jim Al-Khalili, a theoretical physicist from Surrey University, told the BBC. “Inside that shell, inside that body that was paralyzed, was someone who was full of vigour, full of passion for life.”

Robert Browning wrote that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” Stephen Hawking’s reach was so great he sought to know not just heaven but its maker.

Yet, as Hawking’s children said in a statement after his passing, he spoke in themes that even laymen could understand.

“He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ ”

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of a man who set himself the challenge of knowing the mind of God