Cambridge puts Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis online
LONDON : The 1965 doctoral thesis of Stephen Hawking has been made available online by the University of Cambridge, providing a glimpse into the mind of the scientist when he was a 24-year-old student.
Titled Properties of Expanding Universes, the thesis has been made accessible via Cambridge’s open access repository Apollo, a statement from the university on Monday said.
“By making my PhD thesis open access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet, to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos,” Hawking said in a statement released by the university.
The university said it hopes to encourage former academics, including 98 Nobel affiliates, to make their work freely available to all.
Jessica Gardner, director of the university’s library services, said: “The Cambridge University library is home to the physical papers of such greats as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Their research data was on paper and we have preserved that with great care and share it openly on line through our digital library.”
The university said Apollo is home to over 200,000 digital objects, including 15,000 research articles, 10,000 images, 2,400 theses and 1,000 datasets. The items made available in Apollo have been accessed from nearly every country.