Physicist Hawking dies at 76

LONDON — Stephen Hawking, the British physicist who brought science to a mass audience even though his body was paralyzed by disease, has died. He was 76.

Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England, early today, a spokesman for his family said in an emailed statement.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years,” his children Lucy, Robert and Tim said in the statement. “His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humor inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him forever.”

The best-known theoretical physicist of his time, Hawking wrote so lucidly of the mysteries of space, time and black holes that his book, A Brief History of Time, became an international bestseller, making him one of science’s biggest celebrities since Albert Einstein.

Hawking was diagnosed at age 21 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis — ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease — then stunned doctors by living with the normally fatal illness for more than 50 years.

For 30 years, Hawking was Cambridge’s Lucasian professor of mathematics, a chair once held by Isaac Newton. In that post, Hawking redefined cosmology by proposing that black holes emit radiation and later evaporate. He also showed that the universe had a beginning by describing how Einstein’s theory of general relativity eventually breaks down when time and space are traced back to the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago.