A BRIEF HISTORY OF STEPHEN HAWKING’S TIME ON EARTH
Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking, 76, died on 13 March at his home in Cambridge, England. The cosmologist and author passed away due to complications related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a progressive neurodegenerative disease. In this brief biography, we look at Hawking’s life and biggest achievements.
LIFE AND EDUCATION:
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KEY ACHIEVEMENTS:
• • • • • • Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England. He studied natural science in 1959 at Oxford University. Hawking earned a place at Cambridge for his PhD. At 21, he was diagnosed with a motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. He became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge—a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking along with English mathematical physicist Roger Penrose did ground-breaking work on singularities. Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems theorised that the universe might have begun as a singularity. Hawking along with James Bardeen and Brandon Carter, discovered the four laws of black hole mechanics. He showed that black holes emit radiation (Hawking radiation), which may continue till they exhaust their energy and evaporate. Hawking theorised how cosmic inflation might give rise to the spread of galaxies in the universe. With James Hartle, he showed that the universe has no beginning as it has no initial boundaries in time or space. His theory of “top-down cosmology” proposes that the universe had not one unique initial state but consisted • • • • • • • of a superposition of many possible initial conditions. Hawking became one of the youngest persons to be elected to the Royal Society of London in 1974. In 1982 he was made Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by the Queen. He was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), the highest award given by the RAS in 1985. In 1987 he was awarded the Paul Dirac Medal by the Institute of Physics for his outstanding contributions to theoretical physics. In 1988, Hawking and Penrose were given the Wolf Prize, a prestigious international award granted in Israel. Hawking authored A Brief History of Time, a book about cosmology for general audience. The book was on The New York Times’ best-seller list for three years and The Sunday Times’ UK best-seller list for nearly five years. Hawking was honoured with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.