A brief history of genius

> Hawking dedicated his life to unlocking secrets of the Universe

LONDON: Stephen Hawking, who has died aged 76, was Britain’s most famous modern day scientist, a genius who dedicated his life to unlocking the secrets of the Universe.

His 1988 book A Brief History of Time sought to explain to nonscientists the fundamental theories of the universe and it became a bestseller, bringing him global acclaim.

Born on Jan 8, 1942 – 300 years to the day after the death of the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei – he believed science was his destiny.

But fate also dealt Hawking a cruel hand.

Most of his life was spent in a wheelchair crippled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a form of motor neurone disease that attacks the nerves controlling voluntary movement.

“I am quite often asked: how do you feel about having ALS?” he once wrote.

“The answer is, not a lot. I try to lead as normal a life as possible.”

Stephen William Hawking, though, was far from normal.

Inside the shell of his increasingly useless body was a razor-sharp mind, fascinated by the nature of the Universe, how it was formed and how it might end.

“My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”

Much of that work centred on bringing together relativity – the nature of space and time – and quantum theory – how the smallest particles in the Universe behave – to explain the creation of the Universe and how it is governed.

In 1974, he became one of the youngest fellows of Britain’s most prestigious scientific body, the Royal Society, at the age of 32.

In 1979 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, where he had moved from Oxford University to study theoretical astronomy and cosmology.

A previous holder of the prestigious post was the 17thcentury British scientist Isaac Newton.

He eventually put Newton’s gravitational theories to the test in 2007 when, aged 65, he went on a weightless flight in the US.

In the same year, he published a children’s book, George’s Secret Key to the Universe, with his daughter, Lucy.

Hawking also moved into popular culture, with cameos in Star Trek: The Next Generation and The Simpsons. – AFP

This combination of pictures created on March 14, 2018 shows (top left to bottom right) Hawking at a press conference at One World Observatory, New York in 2016; at the London 2012 Paralympic Games; speaking by hologram in Hong Kong, beamed live from...