British physicist known as a great scientist, man
LONDON — Stephen Hawking, the British physicist whose body was chained to a wheelchair by the ravages of a degenerative neuromuscular disease, but whose mind soared to the boundaries of the universe and beyond, died Wednesday in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
His death came from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, from which he had suffered since he was 20.
“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 a statement.
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.
The combination of his best-selling book and his almost total disability — for a while he could use a few fingers, later he could only tighten the muscles on his face — made him one of science’s most recognizable faces.
His early life was chronicled in the 2014 film “The Theory of Everything,” with Eddie Redmayne winning the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the scientist.
Redmayne paid tribute to him Wednesday.
“We have lost a truly beautiful mind, an astonishing scientist and the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet.”
The British actor won an Oscar for playing the mathematical genius across decades of physical degeneration — all under Hawking's watchful gaze.
His achievements, and his longevity, also helped prove to many that even the most severe disabilities need not stop patients from living.
Hawking, whose contributions to theoretical physics are frequently compared to those of Einstein, was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, occupying the same seat once held by Sir Isaac Newton.
Carrying out complex mathematical calculations in his head because of his physical inability to use pencils — a feat once compared to Mozart scoring an entire symphony in his head — and speaking only with a computer-controlled speech synthesizer, Hawking reshaped basic ideas about the universe not once but twice.
He first helped to promote the theory that the universe originated in a “big bang” about 15 billion years ago, then reversed field and postulated a universe without beginning or end.
Hawking’s field was cosmology, the branch of physics that deals with the origin, structure and evolution of the universe. “My goal is simple,” Hawking once told Science magazine. “It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
Hawking made his reputation with his study of “singularities,” unimaginable objects predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. When a star with several times the mass of our sun exhausts its nuclear fuel, it collapses, its matter crushing together with such force that it forms a singularity, an infinitely dense point with no dimensions and infinitely large gravity.
The region around the singularity is a “black hole,” whose immense gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping.
Although a variety of evidence confirmed the existence of black holes, physicists in the 1960s were less sure about singularities, questioning whether a real object could be so small as to be dimensionless and nonetheless be infinitely dense.
Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on Jan. 8, 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of the great astronomer Galileo, as he often noted.