stephen hawking brief biography

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Stephen Hawking

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When was Stephen Hawking born?

Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942.

When did Stephen Hawking die?

Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018.

Where did Stephen Hawking get his education?

Stephen Hawking received a bachelor’s degree in physics from University College, Oxford , in 1962 and a doctorate in physics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge , in 1966.

What was Stephen Hawking famous for?

Stephen Hawking worked on the physics of black holes . He proposed that black holes would emit subatomic particles until they eventually exploded. He also wrote best-selling books, the most famous of which was A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988).

Stephen Hawking (born January 8, 1942, Oxford , Oxfordshire, England—died March 14, 2018, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire) was an English theoretical physicist whose theory of exploding black holes drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics . He also worked with space-time singularities.

Hawking studied physics at University College, Oxford ( B.A. , 1962), and Trinity Hall, Cambridge ( Ph.D. , 1966). He was elected a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge. In the early 1960s Hawking contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis , an incurable degenerative neuromuscular disease. He continued to work despite the disease’s progressively disabling effects.

Hawking worked primarily in the field of general relativity and particularly on the physics of black holes. In 1971 he suggested the formation, following the big bang , of numerous objects containing as much as one billion tons of mass but occupying only the space of a proton . These objects, called mini black holes , are unique in that their immense mass and gravity require that they be ruled by the laws of relativity, while their minute size requires that the laws of quantum mechanics apply to them also. In 1974 Hawking proposed that, in accordance with the predictions of quantum theory, black holes emit subatomic particles until they exhaust their energy and finally explode. Hawking’s work greatly spurred efforts to theoretically delineate the properties of black holes, objects about which it was previously thought that nothing could be known. His work was also important because it showed these properties’ relationship to the laws of classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.

Hawking’s contributions to physics earned him many exceptional honours. In 1974 the Royal Society elected him one of its youngest fellows. He became professor of gravitational physics at Cambridge in 1977, and in 1979 he was appointed to Cambridge’s Lucasian professorship of mathematics, a post once held by Isaac Newton . Hawking was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and a Companion of Honour in 1989. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 2006 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In 2008 he accepted a visiting research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

His publications included The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973; coauthored with G.F.R. Ellis), Superspace and Supergravity (1981), The Very Early Universe (1983), and the best sellers A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), A Briefer History of Time (2005), and The Grand Design (2010; coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow).

Biography Online

Stephen Hawking Biography

Early life Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England. His family had moved to Oxford to escape the threat of V2 rockets over London. As a child, he showed prodigious talent and unorthodox study methods. On leaving school, he got a place at University College, Oxford University where he studied Physics. His physics tutor at Oxford, Robert Berman, later said that Stephen Hawking was an extraordinary student. He used few books and made no notes, but could work out theorems and solutions in a way other students couldn’t.

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

– Stephen Hawking’s Universe (1985) by John Boslough, Ch. 7

It was in Cambridge that Stephen Hawking first started to develop symptoms of neuro-muscular problems – a type of motor neuron disease. This quickly started to hamper his physical movements. His speech became slurred, and he became unable to even to feed himself. At one stage, the doctors gave him a lifespan of three years. However, the progress of the disease slowed down, and he has managed to overcome his severe disability to continue his research and active public engagements. At Cambridge, a fellow scientist developed a synthetic speech device which enabled him to speak by using a touchpad. This early synthetic speech sound has become the ‘voice’ of Stephen Hawking, and as a result, he has kept the original sound of this early model – despite technological advancements.

Nevertheless, despite the latest technology, it can still be a time-consuming process for him to communicate. Stephen Hawking has taken a pragmatic view to his disability:

“It is a waste of time to be angry about my disability. One has to get on with life and I haven’t done badly. People won’t have time for you if you are always angry or complaining. ” The Guardian (27 September 2005)

Stephen Hawking’s principal fields of research have been involved in theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

Amongst many other achievements, he developed a mathematical model for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He has also undertaken a lot of work on the nature of the Universe, The Big Bang and Black Holes.

In 1974, he outlined his theory that black holes leak energy and fade away to nothing. This became known as “Hawking radiation” in 1974. With mathematicians Roger Penrose he demonstrated that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity implies space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.

Despite being one of the best physicists of his generation, he has also been able to translate difficult physics models into a general understanding for the general public. His books – A Brief History of Time and The Universe in A Nutshell have both became runaway bestsellers – with a Brief History of Time staying in the Bestsellers lists for over 230 weeks and selling over 10 million copies. In his books, Hawking tries to explain scientific concepts in everyday language and give an overview to the workings behind the cosmos.

“The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.”

–  A Brief History Of Time (1998) ch. 8

Stephen Hawking has become one of the most famous scientists of his generation. He makes frequent public engagements and his portrayed himself in popular media culture from programmes, such as The Simpsons to Star Trek.

Hawking had the capacity to relate the most complex physics to relateable incidents in everyday life.

“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.”

Stephen Hawking. 7 January 2016 –  Reith lecture at the Royal Institute in London.

In the late 1990s, he was reportedly offered a knighthood, but 10 years later revealed he had turned it down over issues with the government’s funding for science

He married Jane Wilde, a language student in 1965. He said this was a real turning point for him at a time when he was fatalistic because of his illness. They later divorced but had three children.

Stephen Hawking passed away on 14 March 2018 at his home in Cambridge.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Stephen Hawking ”, Oxford, UK – www.biographyonline.net . Last updated 15 January 2018.

A Brief History Of Time

A Brief History Of Time by Stephen Hawking at Amazon

Quotes of Stephen Hawking

“If we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

– Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993)

“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

– A Brief History of Time (1988)

“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.”

– Stephen Hawking

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”

– Stephen Hawking (BT advert 1993)

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Comment and Physics

A brief history of stephen hawking: a legacy of paradox.

By Stuart Clark

14 March 2018

Gemma Levine/Getty

Stephen Hawking, the world-famous theoretical physicist, has died at the age of 76.

Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour 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 for ever.”

Stephen Hawking dies aged 76

Tributes flow in following the death of world-famous theoretical physicist stephen hawking.

The most recognisable scientist of our age, Hawking holds an iconic status. His genre-defining book, A Brief History of Time , has sold more than 10 million copies since its publication in 1988, and has been translated into more than 35 languages. He appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation , The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory . His early life was the subject of an Oscar-winning performance by Eddie Redmayne in the 2014 film  The Theory of Everything . He was routinely consulted for oracular pronouncements on everything from time travel and alien life to Middle Eastern politics and nefarious robots . He had an endearing sense of humour and a daredevil attitude – relatable human traits that, combined with his seemingly superhuman mind, made Hawking eminently marketable.

But his cultural status – amplified by his disability and the media storm it invoked – often overshadowed his scientific legacy. That’s a shame for the man who discovered what might prove to be the key clue to the theory of everything , advanced our understanding of space and time, helped shape the course of physics for the last four decades and whose insight continues to drive progress in fundamental physics today.

Beginning with the big bang

Hawking’s research career began with disappointment. Arriving at the University of Cambridge in 1962 to begin his PhD, he was told that Fred Hoyle , his chosen supervisor, already had a full complement of students. The most famous British astrophysicist at the time, Hoyle was a magnet for the more ambitious students. Hawking didn’t make the cut. Instead, he was to work with Dennis Sciama, a physicist Hawking knew nothing about. In the same year, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neurone disease that quickly robs people of the ability to voluntarily move their muscles. He was told he had two years to live.

Although Hawking’s body may have weakened, his intellect stayed sharp. Two years into his PhD, he was having trouble walking and talking, but it was clear that the disease was progressing more slowly than the doctors had initially feared. Meanwhile, his engagement to Jane Wilde – with whom he later had three children, Robert, Lucy and Tim – renewed his drive to make real progress in physics.

Stephen and Lucy Hawking

James Veysey/Camera Press

Working with Sciama had its advantages. Hoyle’s fame meant that he was seldom in the department, whereas Sciama was around and eager to talk. Those discussions stimulated the young Hawking to pursue his own scientific vision. Hoyle was vehemently opposed to the big bang theory (in fact, he had coined the name “big bang” in mockery). Sciama, on the other hand, was happy for Hawking to investigate the beginning of time.

Time’s arrow

Hawking was studying the work of Roger Penrose , which proved that if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, at the heart of every black hole must be a point where space and time themselves break down – a singularity. Hawking realised that if time’s arrow were reversed, the same reasoning would hold true for the universe as a whole. Under Sciama’s encouragement, he worked out the maths and was able to prove it: the universe according to general relativity began in a singularity.

Hawking was well aware, however, that Einstein didn’t have the last word. General relativity, which describes space and time on a large scale, doesn’t take into account quantum mechanics , which describes matter’s strange behaviour at much smaller scales. Some unknown “theory of everything” was needed to unite the two. For Hawking, the singularity at the universe’s origin did not signal the breakdown of space and time; it signalled the need for quantum gravity .

Luckily, the link that he forged between Penrose’s singularity and the singularity at the big bang provided a key clue for finding such a theory. If physicists wanted to understand the origin of the universe, Hawking had just shown them exactly where to look: a black hole .

Black holes were a subject ripe for investigation in the early 1970s. Although Karl Schwarzschild had found such objects lurking in the equations of general relativity back in 1915, theoreticians viewed them as mere mathematical anomalies and were reluctant to believe they could actually exist.

Albeit frightening, their action is reasonably straightforward: black holes have such strong gravitational fields that nothing, not even light, can escape their grip. Any matter that falls into one is forever lost to the outside world. This, however, is a dagger in the heart of thermodynamics.

Stephen Hawking's final theorem turns time and causality inside out

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Thermodynamic threat

The second law of thermodynamics is one of the most well-established laws of nature. It states that the entropy, or level of disorder in a system, always increases. The second law gives form to the observation that ice cubes will melt into a puddle, but a puddle of water will never spontaneously turn into a block of ice. All matter contains entropy, so what happens when it is dropped into a black hole? Is entropy lost along with it? If so, the total entropy of the universe goes down and black holes would violate the second law of thermodynamics.

Hawking thought that this was fine. He was happy to discard any concept that stood in the way to a deeper truth. And if that meant the second law, then so be it.

Bekenstein and breakthrough

But Hawking met his match at a 1972 physics summer school in the French ski resort of Les Houches, France. Princeton University graduate student Jacob Bekenstein thought that the second law of thermodynamics should apply to black holes too. Bekenstein had been studying the entropy problem and had reached a possible solution thanks to an earlier insight of Hawking’s .

A black hole hides its singularity with a boundary known as the event horizon. Nothing that crosses the event horizon can ever return to the outside. Hawking’s work had shown that the area of a black hole’s event horizon never decreases over time. What’s more, when matter falls into a black hole, the area of its event horizon grows.

Bekenstein realised this was key to the entropy problem. Every time a black hole swallows matter, its entropy appears to be lost, and at the same time, its event horizon grows. So, Bekenstein suggested, what if – to preserve the second law – the area of the horizon is itself a measure of entropy?

Hawking immediately disliked the idea and was angry that his own work had been used in support of a concept so flawed. With entropy comes heat, but the black hole couldn’t be radiating heat – nothing can escape its pull of gravity. During a break from the lectures, Hawking got together with colleagues Brandon Carter, who also studied under Sciama, and James Bardeen, of the University of Washington, and confronted Bekenstein.

The disagreement bothered Bekenstein. “These three were senior people. I was just out of my PhD. You worry whether you are just stupid and these guys know the truth,” he recalls.

Back in Cambridge, Hawking set out to prove Bekenstein wrong. Instead, he discovered the precise form of the mathematical relationship between entropy and the black hole’s horizon. Rather than destroying the idea, he had confirmed it. It was Hawking’s greatest breakthrough.

Hawking radiation

Hawking now embraced the idea that thermodynamics played a part in black holes. Anything that has entropy, he reasoned, also has a temperature – and anything that has a temperature can radiate.

His original mistake, Hawking realised, was in only considering general relativity, which says that nothing – no particles, no heat – can escape the grip of a black hole. That changes when quantum mechanics comes into play. According to quantum mechanics, fleeting pairs of particles and antiparticles are constantly appearing out of empty space, only to annihilate and disappear in the blink of an eye. When this happens in the vicinity of an event horizon, a particle-antiparticle pair can be separated – one falls behind the horizon while one escapes, leaving them forever unable to meet and annihilate. The orphaned particles stream away from the black hole’s edge as radiation. The randomness of quantum creation becomes the randomness of heat.

“I think most physicists would agree that Hawking’s greatest contribution is the prediction that black holes emit radiation,” says Sean Carroll , a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “While we still don’t have experimental confirmation that Hawking’s prediction is true, nearly every expert believes he was right.”

Experiments to test Hawking’s prediction are so difficult because the more massive a black hole is, the lower its temperature. For a large black hole – the kind astronomers can study with a telescope – the temperature of the radiation is too insignificant to measure. As Hawking himself often noted, it was for this reason that he was never awarded a Nobel Prize. Still, the prediction was enough to secure him a prime place in the annals of science, and the quantum particles that stream from the black hole’s edge would forever be known as Hawking radiation .

Some have suggested that they should more appropriately be called Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, but Bekenstein himself rejects this. “The entropy of a black hole is called Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, which I think is fine. I wrote it down first, Hawking found the numerical value of the constant, so together we found the formula as it is today. The radiation was really Hawking’s work. I had no idea how a black hole could radiate. Hawking brought that out very clearly. So that should be called Hawking radiation.”

Theory of everything

The Bekenstein-Hawking entropy equation is the one Hawking asked to have engraved on his tombstone. It represents the ultimate mash-up of physical disciplines because it contains Newton’s constant, which clearly relates to gravity; Planck’s constant, which betrays quantum mechanics at play; the speed of light, the talisman of Einstein’s relativity; and the Boltzmann constant, the herald of thermodynamics.

The presence of these diverse constants hinted at a theory of everything, in which all physics is unified. Furthermore, it strongly corroborated Hawking’s original hunch that understanding black holes would be key in unlocking that deeper theory.

Hawking’s breakthrough may have solved the entropy problem, but it raised an even more difficult problem in its wake. If black holes can radiate, they will eventually evaporate and disappear. So what happens to all the information that fell in? Does it vanish too? If so, it will violate a central tenet of quantum mechanics. On the other hand, if it escapes from the black hole, it will violate Einstein’s theory of relativity. With the discovery of black hole radiation, Hawking had pit the ultimate laws of physics against one another. The black hole information loss paradox had been born.

Hawking staked his position in another ground-breaking and even more contentious paper entitled Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse, published in Physical Review D in 1976. He argued that when a black hole radiates away its mass, it does take all of its information with it – despite the fact that quantum mechanics expressly forbids information loss. Soon other physicists would pick sides, for or against this idea, in a debate that continues to this day. Indeed, many feel that information loss is the most pressing obstacle in understanding quantum gravity.

“Hawking’s 1976 argument that black holes lose information is a towering achievement, perhaps one of the most consequential discoveries on the theoretical side of physics since the subject was invented,” says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley.

By the late 1990s, results emerging from string theory had most theoretical physicists convinced that Hawking was wrong about information loss, but Hawking, known for his stubbornness, dug in his heels. It wasn’t until 2004 that he would change his mind. And he did it with flair – dramatically showing up at a conference in Dublin and announcing his updated view : black holes cannot lose information.

Today, however, a new paradox known as the firewall has thrown everything into doubt (see “Hawking’s paradox”, below). It is clear that the question Hawking raised is at the core of the quest for quantum gravity.

“Black hole radiation raises serious puzzles we are still working very hard to understand,” says Carroll . “It’s fair to say that Hawking radiation is the single biggest clue we have to the ultimate reconciliation of quantum mechanics and gravity, arguably the greatest challenge facing theoretical physics today.”

Hawking’s legacy, says Bousso, will be “having put his finger on the key difficulty in the search for a theory of everything”.

Hawking continued pushing the boundaries of theoretical physics at a seemingly impossible pace for the rest of his life. He made important inroads towards understanding how quantum mechanics applies to the universe as a whole, leading the way in the field known as quantum cosmology. His progressive disease pushed him to tackle problems in novel ways, which contributed to his remarkable intuition for his subject. As he lost the ability to write out long, complicated equations, Hawking found new and inventive methods to solve problems in his head, usually by reimagining them in geometric form. But, like Einstein before him, Hawking never produced anything quite as revolutionary as his early work.

“Hawking’s most influential work was done in the 1970s, when he was younger,” says Carroll, “but that’s completely standard even for physicists who aren’t burdened with a debilitating neurone disease.”

Stephen Hawking's black hole paradox may finally have a solution

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Hawking the superstar

In the meantime, the publication of A Brief History of Time catapulted Hawking to cultural stardom and gave a fresh face to theoretical physics. He never seemed to mind. “In front of the camera, Hawking played the character of Hawking. He seemed to play with his cultural status,” says Hélène Mialet, an anthropologist from the University of California, Berkeley, who courted controversy in 2012 with the publication of her book Hawking Incorporated. In it, she investigated the way the people around Hawking helped him build and maintain his public image .

That public image undoubtedly made his life easier than it might otherwise have been. As Hawking’s disease progressed, technologists gladly provided increasingly complicated machines to allow him to communicate. This, in turn, let him continue doing the thing for which he should ultimately be remembered: his science.

“Stephen Hawking has done more to advance our understanding of gravitation than anyone since Einstein,” Carroll says. “He was a world-leading theoretical physicist, clearly the best in the world for his time among those working at the intersection of gravity and quantum mechanics, and he did it all in the face of a terrible disease. He is an inspirational figure, and history will certainly remember him that way.”

Hawking’s paradox

In 2012, four physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara – Ahmed Almheiri, Donald Marolf, Joseph Polchinski and James Sully, known collectively by physicists as AMPS – shocked the physics community with the results of a thought experiment .

When pairs of particles and antiparticles spawn near a black hole’s event horizon, each pair shares a connection called entanglement. But what happens to this link and the information it holds when one of the pair falls in, leaving its twin to become a particle of Hawking radiation (see main story)?

One school of thought holds that the information is preserved as the hole evaporates, and that it is placed into subtle correlations among these particles of Hawking radiation.

But, AMPS asked, what does it look like to observers inside and outside the black hole? Enter Alice and Bob.

According to Bob, who remains outside the black hole, that particle has been separated from its antiparticle partner by the horizon. In order to preserve information, it must become entangled with another particle of Hawking radiation.

But what’s happening from the point of view of Alice, who falls into the black hole? General relativity says that for a free-falling observer, gravity disappears, so she doesn’t see the event horizon. According to Alice, the particle in question remains entangled with its antiparticle partner, because there is no horizon to separate them. The paradox is born.

So who is right? Bob or Alice? If it’s Bob, then Alice will not encounter empty space at the horizon as general relativity claims. Instead she will be burned to a crisp by a wall of Hawking radiation – a firewall. If it’s Alice who’s right, then information will be lost, breaking a fundamental rule of quantum mechanics. “The fervent controversy surrounding Hawking’s paradox reflects the stakes his work has raised: in quantising gravity, what gives? And how much?” says Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley. The answer awaits us in the theory of everything. Amanda Gefter

Article amended on 14 March 2018

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Stephen Hawking (January 8, 1942–March 14, 2018) was a world-renowned cosmologist and physicist, especially esteemed for overcoming an extreme physical disability to pursue his groundbreaking scientific work. He was a bestselling author whose books made complex ideas accessible to the general public. His theories provided deep insights into the connections between quantum physics and relativity, including how those concepts might be united in explaining fundamental questions related to the development of the universe and the formation of black holes.

Fast Facts: Stephen Hawking

• Known For : Cosmologist, physicist, best-selling science writer
• Also Known As : Steven William Hawking
• Born : January 8, 1942 in Oxfordshire, England
• Parents : Frank and Isobel Hawking
• Died: March 14, 2018 in Cambridge, England
• Education : St Albans School, B.A., University College, Oxford, Ph.D., Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1966
• Published Works :  A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, The Universe in a Nutshell, On the Shoulders of Giants, A Briefer History of Time, The Grand Design, My Brief History
• Awards and Honors : Fellow of the Royal Society, the Eddington Medal, the Royal Society's Hughes Medal, the Albert Einstein Medal, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord, the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society, the Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society
• Spouses : Jane Wilde, Elaine Mason
• Children : Robert, Lucy, Timothy
• Notable Quote : “Most of the threats we face come from the progress we’ve made in science and technology. We are not going to stop making progress, or reverse it, so we must recognize the dangers and control them. I’m an optimist, and I believe we can.”

Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxfordshire, England, where his mother had been sent for safety during the German bombings of London of World War II. His mother Isobel Hawking was an Oxford graduate and his father Frank Hawking was a medical researcher.

After Stephen's birth, the family reunited in London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. The family then moved to St. Albans so that Stephen's father could pursue medical research at the nearby Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill.

Education and Medical Diagnosis

Stephen Hawking attended school in St. Albans, where he was an unexceptional student. His brilliance was much more apparent in his years at Oxford University. He specialized in physics and graduated with first-class honors despite his relative lack of diligence. In 1962, he continued his education at Cambridge University, pursuing a Ph.D. in cosmology.

At age 21, a year after beginning his doctoral program, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (also known as motor neuron disease, ALS, and Lou Gehrig's disease). Given only three years to live, he has written that this prognosis helped motivate him in his physics work .

There is little doubt that his ability to remain actively engaged with the world through his scientific work helped him persevere in the face of the disease. The support of family and friends were equally key. This is vividly portrayed in the dramatic film "The Theory of Everything."

The ALS Progresses

As his illness progressed, Hawking became less mobile and began using a wheelchair. As part of his condition, Hawking eventually lost his ability to speak, so he utilized a device capable of translating his eye movements (since he could no longer utilize a keypad) to speak in a digitized voice.

In addition to his keen mind within physics, he gained respect throughout the world as a science communicator. His achievements are deeply impressive on their own, but some of the reason he is so universally respected was his ability to accomplish so much while suffering the severe debility caused by ALS.

Marriage and Children

Just before his diagnosis, Hawking met Jane Wilde, and the two were married in 1965. The couple had three children before separating. Hawking later married Elaine Mason in 1995 and they divorced in 2006.

Career as Academic and Author

Hawking stayed on at Cambridge after his graduation, first as a research fellow and then as a professional fellow. For most of his academic career, Hawking served as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton .

Following a long tradition, Hawking retired from this post at age 67, in the spring of 2009, though he continued his research at the university's cosmology institute. In 2008 he also accepted a position as a visiting researcher at Waterloo, Ontario's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

In 1982 Hawking began work on a popular book on cosmology. By 1984 he had produced the first draft of "A Brief History of Time," which he published in 1988 after some medical setbacks. This book remained on the Sunday Times bestsellers list for 237 weeks. Hawking's even more accessible "A Briefer History of Time" was published in 2005.

Fields of Study

Hawking's major research was in the areas of theoretical cosmology , focusing on the evolution of the universe as governed by the laws of general relativity . He is most well-known for his work in the study of black holes . Through his work, Hawking was able to:

• Prove that singularities are general features of spacetime.
• Provide mathematical proof that information which fell into a black hole was lost.
• Demonstrate that black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation .

On March 14, 2018, Stephen Hawking died in his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76. His ashes were placed in London’s Westminster Abbey between the final resting places of Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

Stephen Hawking made large contributions as a scientist, science communicator, and as a heroic example of how enormous obstacles can be overcome. The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication is a prestigious award that "recognizes the merit of popular science on an international level."

Thanks to his distinctive appearance, voice, and popularity, Stephen Hawking is often represented in popular culture. He made appearances on the television shows "The Simpsons" and "Futurama," as well as having a cameo on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1993.

"The Theory of Everything," a biographical drama film about Hawking's life, was released in 2014.

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• 14 March 2018

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)

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Martin Rees is Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom. He was a student in Dennis Sciama’s research group at the University of Cambridge at the same time as Stephen Hawking.

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Stephen Hawking in Cambridge, January 1993. Credit: David Montgomery/Getty

When Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with motor-neuron disease at the age of 21, it wasn’t clear that he would finish his PhD. Against all expectations, he lived on for 55 years, becoming one of the world’s most celebrated scientists.

Hawking, who died on 14 March 2018, was born in Oxford, UK, in 1942 to a medical-researcher father and a philosophy-graduate mother. After attending St Albans School near London, he earned a first-class degree in physics from the University of Oxford. He began his research career in 1962, enrolling as a graduate student in a group at the University of Cambridge led by one of the fathers of modern cosmology, Dennis Sciama.

The general theory of relativity was at that time undergoing a renaissance, initiated in part by Roger Penrose at Birkbeck College, London, who had introduced new mathematical techniques. These showed that generic gravitational collapse would lead to singularities — infinities that signal the need for new physics.

Stephen Hawking: A life in science

The implications for black holes and the Big Bang were developed by Hawking in a series of papers collated in the 1973 monograph The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge University Press), co-authored with George Ellis, a near-contemporary who had also been a student of Sciama. Especially important was the realization that the area of black holes’ horizons (‘one-way membranes’ that shroud the singularities, and from within which nothing can escape) could never decrease. The analogy with entropy — a measure of disorder that likewise can never decrease — was developed further by physicist Jacob Bekenstein.

These findings gained Hawking election to the Royal Society in London in 1974, at the age of 32. By then, he was so frail that both movement and speech were difficult, and most of us suspected that his days in front-line research were numbered. But in that same year, he came up with his most distinctive contribution to science: Hawking radiation.

By linking quantum theory and gravity, Hawking showed that a black hole would not be completely black, but would radiate with a well-defined temperature that depended inversely on its mass ( S. W. Hawking Nature 248, 30–31; 1974 ). Black-hole entropy was more than just an analogy. The implication was that the radiation would cause black holes to ‘evaporate’. This process would be unobservably slow, except in ‘mini-holes’ the size of atoms — and these are thought not to exist. Yet Hawking radiation — and the related issue of whether information that falls into a black hole is lost or is somehow recoverable from the radiation — was a profound issue, and one that still engenders controversy among theoretical physicists. Indeed, theorist Andrew Strominger at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said in 2016 that one of Hawking’s papers on the subject ( S. W. Hawking Phys. Rev. D 14, 2460–2473; 1976 ) had caused “more sleepless nights among theoretical physicists than any paper in history”.

By the end of the 1970s, Hawking had been appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge (former incumbents include Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac); he held the post until he retired in 2009. During these years, in which his focus shifted to the quantum aspects of the Big Bang, the issue of information loss in black holes continued to challenge him.

In 1985, Stephen underwent a tracheotomy, which removed his already limited powers of speech. He was able to control a cursor on a screen and type out sentences — albeit with increasingly painful slowness (first with his hand, and eventually only with a cheek muscle). A speech synthesizer processed his words and generated the androidal accent that became his trademark. In this way, he completed his best-selling book A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988), which propelled him to celebrity status.

Had Hawking achieved equal distinction in any other branch of science besides cosmology, it probably would not have had the same resonance with a worldwide public. As I put it in The Telegraph newspaper in 2007, “the concept of an imprisoned mind roaming the cosmos” grabbed people’s imagination.

In 1965, Stephen married Jane Wilde. After 25 years of marriage, and three children, the strain of Stephen’s illness and of sharing their home with a team of nurses became too much and they separated, divorcing in 1995. Jane wrote a book about their life together, Travelling to Infinity (Alma, 2008), and both she and Stephen were happy with the telling of their story in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything (although it elides and conflates Stephen’s science). After a second, briefer marriage, Stephen was supported by an entourage of assistants, as well as his family.

Stephen remained remarkably positive throughout his life, despite the immense frustration that his condition clearly caused. He enjoyed theatre and opera trips, and he seemed energized rather than exhausted by his travels to all parts of the world, as well as by his regular trips to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He retained robust common sense and a sense of humour, expressed forceful opinions, supported political causes and was happy to engage with the media, despite its insistent attention. His comments gained outsized attention even on subjects in which he was not a specialist, such as philosophy and the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Stephen’s expectations when he was diagnosed dropped to zero; he said that everything that had happened since had been a bonus. And what a bonus — for physics, for the millions enlightened by his books and for the even larger number inspired by his achievement against all the odds.

Nature 555 , 444 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02839-9

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• Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking

Stephen Hawking is one of the most precious gems in the world of physics, who was ahead of his time. His disability of having unsteady feet and being diagnosed with degenerative disease couldn’t stop Stephen Hawking from becoming the world’s most famous and acclaimed scientist. Even his survival would have been a marvel to this world, but he lived amazingly till 76.

Table of Contents

• Who was Stephen Hawking?
• Stephen Hawking’s Education Awards & Achievements
• The Black Hole Theory

The Big Bang

Hawking radiation, the multiverse, who was stephen william hawking.

Stephen William Hawking was a British physicist, born on 8th January 1942. He is considered the most brilliant theoretical physicist of all time. He revolutionized the field of physics through his work on the origin of the universe and the black hole explosion theory. From the big bang to black holes, all his best-selling books appealed to physics lovers across the globe.

The English theoretical physicist whose theory of the explosion of black holes illustrated upon the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He also worked in the field of space-time singularities.

Stephen Hawking’s Education Awards & Achievements

Stephen William Hawking studied physics in 1962 at the University College, Cambridge and in 1966 in the Trinity Hall, Cambridge,. His contributions in physics are unparalleled, which often left other scientists scratching their heads.

Professor Stephen William Hawking holds 13 honorary degrees. He was bestowed CBE (1982), Fellow of Honor (1989) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009).

He has received the Fundamental Physics Award (2013), the Copley Medal (2006) and the Wolf Foundation Award (1988). Along with a bunch of other honours awards and medals, he won the Adams Prize in 1966 for his essay Singularities and the Space-time Geometry.

He was also a member of the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

The physics of black hole.

Stephen William Hawking’s name has always been associated with the black hole. He put forward his stroke of genius combining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity , which has already aroused curiosity and has been under debate for decades, and the theory of quantum mechanics. In the early 1970s, Hawkins turned his attention to both of these theories, and later on, Stephen William Hawking’s most famous thesis on black holes was proven right.

Hawking’s doctoral thesis was written at a critical time when there was an argument between two cosmological theories: the Big Bang theory and the Steady State theory. Both these theories were considered to be opposing each other at that time. However, both theories accepted that the universe is expanding, but the first one explains that the universe is expanding from an ultra-compact, super-dense state at a finite time in the past, and the second one assumes that the universe has been intensifying forever.

Hawking showed in his thesis that the Steady State theory is mathematically self-contradictory. He reasoned instead that the universe began as a dense point called a singularity which was infinitely small. His description has been accepted worldwide today.

The photons or the particles of light can’t escape from the black holes because of their intense and strong gravity. But Stephen Hawking argued on it, explaining the truth, which was more complex than the assumed fact. He applied quantum theory, especially the idea of “virtual photons”; he realized that some of these photons could appear to be radiated from the black hole . At a laboratory experiment in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, it has recently been confirmed that this theory is correct and is named Hawking Radiation.

Instead of a real black hole, the researchers used a “sonic black hole” from which sound waves cannot outflow.

Stephen Hawking was also involved in the most exciting topics toward the conclusion of his life was the multiverse theory. He proposed the idea that our universe, with its start in the Big Bang, is just one of an infinite number of contemporaneous bubble universes. In his very last paper in 2018, he proposed a novel mathematical framework and tried to seek out the universe in his own words. But as with any assumption concerning parallel universes, we do not have any idea if his ideas are right now. Maybe the scientists will be able to test his belief in the coming times.

Not only an amazing physicist but Stephen Hawking was an amazing and inspiring personality too, he left behind his great research theories and thoughts as his legacy to us, which is truly a gift in physics.

Stay tuned to BYJU’S for more such interesting articles. Also, register to “BYJU’S – The Learning App” for loads of interactive, engaging Physics-related videos and unlimited academic assistance.

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Apart from one of the most brilliant British physicists Stephen Hawking is famous for his theories on the Big Bang and the black hole concept.

What is Stephen Hawking’s IQ

Stephen Hawking has tried to keep his IQ a secret but it was estimated that his IQ is around 160.

When did Stephen Hawking write his first book?

In 1973 Stephen Hawking wrote his first book which is named as “The Large Scale Structure of Space-TIme”

How many types of Black holes are there?

There are four types of black holes:

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The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model explaining the existence of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution.

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A brief history of Stephen Hawking's time on planet Earth in one chart

Stephen Hawking  was a theoretical physicist who pioneered new understandings of black holes, the universe, and how much one person can achieve.

Hawking died early in the morning on March 14, 2018 — Pi Day and Albert Einstein's birthday .

In passing, he left behind an incredible legacy, especially as a person who struggled with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that confined him to a wheelchair for the vast majority of his life.

Though Hawking's life has filled many books and a feature-length film , we've summarized some of the most memorable and notable moments in the graphical timeline below.

Remembering Stephen Hawking:

• Stephen Hawking has died at 76 — here are some of the most remarkable and memorable things he ever said
• These 15 photos show how Stephen Hawking defied his disability and lived an incredible life 
• Stephen Hawking was only expected to live a few years after being diagnosed with ALS at age 21 — here's what the disease is
• Stephen Hawking died on a day that is cosmically connected to Albert Einstein and Pi
• The man who helped Stephen Hawking achieve his lifelong dream of experiencing zero gravity remembers what it was like to watch the acclaimed physicist break free of his wheelchair
• Stephen Hawking was rumored to run over the toes of people he didn't like with his wheelchair
• Stephen Hawking had a 'sense of humor as vast as the universe': unique tributes flood in for esteemed scientist

Watch: What happens to old Broadway costumes

• Main content

Stephen Hawking

1942-2018 English Theoretical Physicist, Cosmologist and Author

Early Life and Family Background

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. His birth coincided with the 300th anniversary of the death of Galileo Galilei, a fact that Hawking often mentioned. His family was highly intellectual; his father, Frank Hawking, was a research biologist, and his mother, Isobel Hawking, worked as a secretary for a medical research institute.

Hawking's early home life was somewhat unconventional. His family placed a high value on education and intellectual pursuits. Dinnertime often included reading and discussion rather than typical conversation. This environment fostered an early interest in science and learning in Stephen.

Education and Early Interests

Stephen attended St. Albans School, an independent school in Hertfordshire, where he was an average student initially. However, his natural curiosity and intelligence shone through. His interest in science was ignited by two of his teachers, one in mathematics and the other in physics.

In 1959, at the age of 17, Hawking enrolled at University College, Oxford. Initially, he found the academic work easy and somewhat boring. He preferred extracurricular activities such as coxing the rowing team. Despite his initial lack of focus on his studies, Hawking graduated with a first-class BA degree in natural science in 1962.

Graduate Studies and Early Research

Hawking began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1962. He studied under the supervision of Dennis Sciama, a renowned physicist. During his first year at Cambridge, Hawking noticed increasing clumsiness and other symptoms that led to his diagnosis of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) in 1963. The prognosis was grim, and doctors gave him a life expectancy of only two years. This diagnosis initially caused Hawking to become despondent, but he soon found a renewed sense of purpose and determination to continue his research.

Hawking completed his doctorate in 1966 with a thesis on "Properties of Expanding Universes." His work focused on singularities, which are points in spacetime where gravitational forces cause matter to have an infinite density and zero volume. This was a groundbreaking contribution to the field of cosmology.

Professional Career and Major Contributions

Hawking's career was marked by several significant scientific contributions:

1. Singularity Theorems : In collaboration with mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking extended Penrose's singularity theorem concepts to the entire universe. They demonstrated that singularities are not anomalies but rather an essential feature of general relativity. Their work showed that the universe must have originated from a singularity, supporting the Big Bang theory.

2. Hawking Radiation : In 1974, Hawking made a groundbreaking discovery by applying quantum mechanics to black holes. He proposed that black holes could emit radiation due to quantum effects near the event horizon. This radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, suggested that black holes could eventually evaporate and disappear. This discovery was crucial as it bridged the gap between quantum mechanics and general relativity.

3. The No-Boundary Proposal : In collaboration with James Hartle, Hawking developed the no-boundary proposal in 1983. This theory proposed that the universe is finite in size but has no boundaries. In this model, time behaves like another dimension of space at the beginning of the universe. This theory has significant implications for our understanding of the universe's origins.

4. Top-Down Cosmology : Later in his career, Hawking developed the concept of top-down cosmology. This model suggests that the present state of the universe determines its history through a process of quantum superposition, rather than having a single, unique past.

Popular Science and Writing

Stephen Hawking was not only a brilliant scientist but also a gifted communicator. His ability to explain complex scientific concepts to the general public made him a global icon. His book, "A Brief History of Time," published in 1988, became an international bestseller and has sold over 10 million copies. The book explores fundamental questions about the universe, such as the nature of time, black holes, and the Big Bang.

Hawking authored several other popular science books, including:

- "Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays" (1993)

- "The Universe in a Nutshell" (2001)

- "A Briefer History of Time" (2005, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow)

- "The Grand Design" (2010, co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow)

- "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" (2018)

Personal Life and Challenges

Despite his physical limitations, Hawking led a full and active life. He married Jane Wilde in 1965, and they had three children: Robert, Lucy, and Timothy. Jane played a significant role in supporting Stephen through his illness, but their relationship faced many challenges due to his increasing disability and the demands of his career. They separated in 1990 and divorced in 1995.

Hawking later married Elaine Mason, one of his nurses, in 1995. This marriage also faced difficulties, and they divorced in 2006.

Recognition and Honors

Stephen Hawking received numerous honors and awards throughout his life, including:

- Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974

- CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 1982

- Companion of Honour in 1989

- The Wolf Prize in Physics in 1988

- The Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 2006

- The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, awarded by U.S. President Barack Obama

Hawking held the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge from 1979 to 2009, a position once held by Isaac Newton.

Death and Legacy

Stephen Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76. His death was widely mourned, and he was celebrated for his extraordinary contributions to science and his indomitable spirit. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey, alongside other great scientists such as Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

Hawking's work has had a profound impact on our understanding of the universe. His theories continue to influence the fields of cosmology and theoretical physics. Beyond his scientific achievements, Hawking's life story has inspired millions to pursue knowledge and to overcome adversity.

Impact on Popular Culture

Stephen Hawking became a cultural icon, appearing in numerous television shows, documentaries, and films. Notable portrayals include:

- "The Theory of Everything" (2014), a biographical film about his life, starring Eddie Redmayne, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Hawking.

- Guest appearances on popular TV shows like "The Simpsons," "Star Trek: The Next Generation," and "The Big Bang Theory."

Hawking's voice, synthesized by a speech-generating device, became one of the most recognizable in the world. His unique sense of humor and his ability to engage with the public made him a beloved figure beyond the scientific community.

Stephen Hawking's legacy is one of intellectual brilliance, resilience, and an unwavering quest to understand the cosmos. His contributions have left an indelible mark on science and popular culture, ensuring that his name will be remembered for generations to come.

• World Biography

Stephen Hawking Biography

Born: January 8, 1942 Oxford, England English scientist, physicist, and mathematician

British physicist and mathematician Stephen Hawking has made fundamental contributions to the science of cosmology—the study of the origins, structure, and space-time relationships of the universe.

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. His father, a well-known researcher in tropical medicine, urged his son to seek a career in medicine, but Stephen found biology and medicine were not exact enough. Therefore, he turned to the study of mathematics and physics.

Hawking was not an outstanding student at St. Alban's School, nor later at Oxford University, which he entered in 1959. He was a social young man who did little schoolwork because he was able to grasp the essentials of a mathematics or physics problem quickly. At home he reports, "I would take things apart to see how they worked, but they didn't often go back together." His early school years were marked by unhappiness at school, with his peers and on the playing field. While at Oxford he became increasingly interested in physics (study of matter and energy), eventually graduating with a first class honors in physics (1962). He immediately began postgraduate studies at Cambridge University.

Graduate school

The onset of Hawking's graduate education at Cambridge marked a turning point in his life. It was then that he embarked upon the formal study of cosmology, which focused his study. And it was then that he was first stricken with Lou Gehrig's disease, a weakening disease of the nervous and muscular system that eventually led to his total confinement in a wheelchair. At Cambridge his talents were recognized, and he was encouraged to carry on his studies despite his growing physical disabilities. His marriage in 1965 was an important step in his emotional life. Marriage gave him, he recalled, the determination to live and make professional progress in the world of science. Hawking received his doctorate degree in 1966. He then began his lifelong research and teaching association with Cambridge University.

Theory of singularity

Hawking made his first major contribution to science with his idea of singularity, a work that grew out of his collaboration (working relationship) with Roger Penrose. A singularity is a place in either space or time at which some quantity becomes infinite (without an end). Such a place is found in a black hole, the final stage of a collapsed star, where the gravitational field has infinite strength. Penrose proved that a singularity could exist in the space-time of a real universe.

Drawing upon the work of both Penrose and Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Hawking demonstrated that our universe had its origins in a singularity. In the beginning all of the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point, making a very small but tremendously dense body. Ten to twenty billion years ago that body exploded in a big bang that initiated time and the universe. Hawking was able to produce current astrophysical (having to do with the study of stars and the events that occur around them) research to support the big bang theory of the origin of the universe and oppose the competing steady-state theory.

Hawking's research led him to study the characteristics of the best-known singularity: the black hole. A black hole's edges, called the event horizon, can be detected. Hawking proved that the surface area (measurement of the surface) of the event horizon could only increase, not decrease, and that when two black holes merged the surface area of the new hole was larger than the sum of the two original.

Hawking's continuing examination of the nature of black holes led to two important discoveries. The first, that black holes can give off heat, opposed the claim that nothing could escape from a black hole. The second concerned the size of black holes. As originally conceived, black holes were immense in size because they were the end result of the collapse of gigantic stars. Hawking suggested the existence of millions of mini-black holes formed by the force of the original big bang explosion.

Unified field theory

In the 1980s Hawking answered one of Einstein's unanswered theories, the famous unified field theory. A complete unified theory includes the four main interactions known to modern physics. The unified theory explains the conditions that were present at the beginning of the universe as well as the features of the physical laws of nature. When humans develop the unified field theory, said Hawking, they will "know the mind of God."

Publications

As Hawking's physical condition grew worse his intellectual achievements increased. He wrote down his ideas in A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. It sold over a million copies and was listed as the best-selling nonfiction book for over a year.

In 1993 Hawking wrote Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, which, in addition to his scientific thoughts, contains chapters about Hawking's personal life. He coauthored a book in 1996 with Sir Roger Penrose titled The Nature of Space and Time. Issues discussed in this book include whether the universe has boundaries and if it will continue to expand forever. Hawking says yes to the first question and no to the second, while Penrose argues the opposite. Hawking joined Penrose again the following year in the creation of another book, The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind (1997). In 2002 he was likewise celebrating the publication of The Universe in a Nutshell. Despite decreasing health, Hawking traveled on the traditional book release circuit. People with disabilities look to him as a hero.

Honors and commitments

Hawking's work in modern cosmology and in theoretical astronomy and physics is widely recognized. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1974 and five years later was named to a professorial chair at Cambridge University that was once held by Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). Beyond these honors he has earned a host of honorary degrees, awards, prizes, and lectureships from the major universities and scientific societies of Europe and America. By the end of the twentieth century Stephen Hawking had become one of the best-known scientists in the world. His popularity includes endorsing a wireless Internet connection and speaking to wheelchair-bound youth. He also had a special appearance on the television series Star Trek.

Though very private, it is generally known that Stephen's first marriage ended in 1991. He has three children from that marriage.

When asked about his objectives, Hawking told Zygon in a 1995 interview, "My goal is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."

For More Information

Ferguson, Kitty. Stephen Hawking: A Quest for a Theory of the Universe. New York: F. Watts, 1991.

Henderson, Harry. Stephen Hawking. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1995.

McDaniel, Melissa. Stephen Hawking: Revolutionary Physicist. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.

White, Michael, and John Gribbin. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science. New York: Viking, 1992.

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

Professor Stephen Hawking

Credit: Andre Pattenden

Friends and colleagues from the University of Cambridge have paid tribute to Professor Stephen Hawking, who died today at the age of 76.

Widely regarded as one of the world’s most brilliant minds, he was known throughout the world for his contributions to science, his books, his television appearances, his lectures and through biographical films. He leaves three children and three grandchildren.

Professor Hawking broke new ground on the basic laws which govern the universe, including the revelation that black holes have a temperature and produce radiation, now known as Hawking radiation. At the same time, he also sought to explain many of these complex scientific ideas to a wider audience through popular books, most notably his bestseller A Brief History of Time .

He was awarded the CBE in 1982, was made a Companion of Honour in 1989, and was awarded the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He was the recipient of numerous awards, medals and prizes, including the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, the Albert Einstein Award, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Fundamental Physics Prize, and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award for Basic Sciences. He was a Fellow of The Royal Society, a Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

He achieved all this despite a decades-long battle with motor neurone disease, with which he was diagnosed while a student, and eventually led to him being confined to a wheelchair and to communicating via his instantly recognisable computerised voice. His determination in battling with his condition made him a champion for those with a disability around the world.

Professor Hawking came to Cambridge in 1962 as a PhD student, and rose to become the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Isaac Newton, in 1979. In 2009, he retired from this position and was the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics until his death. He was also a member of the University's  Centre for Theoretical Cosmology , which he founded in 2007. He was active scientifically and in the media until the end of his life.

Professor Stephen Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, paid tribute, saying, “Professor Hawking was a unique individual who will be remembered with warmth and affection not only in Cambridge but all over the world. His exceptional contributions to scientific knowledge and the popularisation of science and mathematics have left an indelible legacy. His character was an inspiration to millions. He will be much missed.”

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford although his family was living in north London at the time. In 1959, the family moved to St Albans where he attended St Albans School. Despite the fact that he was always ranked at the lower end of his class by teachers, his school friends nicknamed him ‘Einstein’ and seemed to have encouraged his interest in science. In his own words, “physics and astronomy offered the hope of understanding where we came from and why we are here. I wanted to fathom the depths of the Universe.”

His ambition brought him a scholarship to University College Oxford to read Natural Science. There he studied physics and graduated with a first class honours degree.

He then moved to Trinity Hall , Cambridge and was supervised by Dennis Sciama at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics for his PhD; his thesis was titled  Properties of Expanding Universes . In 2017, he made his PhD thesis freely available online via the  University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository . There have been over a million attempts to download the thesis, demonstrating the enduring popularity of Hawking and his academic legacy.

On completion of his PhD Hawking became a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College where he remained a fellow for the rest of his life. During his early years at Cambridge, he was influenced by Roger Penrose and developed the singularity theorems which show that the Universe began with the Big Bang.

An interest in singularities naturally led to an interest in black holes and his subsequent work in this area laid the foundations for the modern understanding of black holes. He proved that when black holes merge, the surface area of the final black hole must exceed the sum of the areas of the initial black holes, and he showed that this places limits on the amount of energy that can be carried away by gravitational waves in such a merger. He found that there were parallels to be drawn between the laws of thermodynamics and the behaviour of black holes. This eventually led, in 1974, to the revelation that black holes have a temperature and produce radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, a discovery which revolutionised theoretical physics.

He also realised that black holes must have an entropy – often described as a measure of how much disorder is present in a given system – equal to one quarter of the area of their event horizon: – the ‘point of no return’, where the gravitational pull of a black hole becomes so strong that escape is impossible. Some forty odd years later, the precise nature of this entropy is still a puzzle. However, these discoveries led to Hawking formulating the ‘information paradox’ which illustrates a fundamental conflict between quantum mechanics and our understanding of gravitational physics. This is probably the greatest mystery facing theoretical physicists today.

To understand black holes and cosmology requires one to develop a theory of quantum gravity. Quantum gravity is an unfinished project which is attempting to unify general relativity, the theory of gravitation and of space and time with the ideas of quantum mechanics. Hawking’s work on black holes started a new chapter in this quest and most of his subsequent achievements centred on these ideas.

Hawking recognised that quantum mechanical effects in the very early universe might provide the primordial gravitational seeds around which galaxies and other large-scale structures could later form.  This theory of inflationary fluctuations, developed along with others in the early 1980s, is now supported by strong experimental evidence from the COBE, WMAP and Planck satellite observations of the cosmic microwave sky. Another influential idea was Hawking’s ‘no boundary’ proposal which resulted from the application of quantum mechanics to the entire universe. This idea allows one to explain the creation of the universe in a way that is compatible with laws of physics as we currently understand them. 

Professor Hawking’s influential books included The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime , with G F R Ellis; General Relativity: an Einstein centenary survey , with W Israel; Superspace and Supergravity , with M Rocek (1981); The Very Early Universe , with G Gibbons and S Siklos, and 300 Years of Gravitation , with W Israel.

However, it was his popular science books which took Professor Hawking beyond the academic world and made him a household name. The first of these, A Brief History of Time , was published in 1988 and became a surprise bestseller, remaining on the Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Later popular books included Black Holes and Baby Universes , The Universe in a Nutshell , A Briefer History of Time , and My Brief History . He also collaborated with his daughter Lucy on a series of books for children about a character named George who has adventures in space.

In 2014, a film of his life, The Theory of Everything , was released. Based on the book by his first wife Jane, the film follows the story of their life together, from first meeting in Cambridge in 1964, with his subsequent academic successes and his increasing disability. The film was met with worldwide acclaim and Eddie Redmayne, who played Stephen Hawking, won the Academy Award for Best Actor at the 2015 ceremony.

Travel was one of Professor Hawking’s pastimes. One of his first adventures was to be caught up in the 7.1 magnitude Bou-in-Zahra earthquake in Iran in 1962. In 1997 he visited the Antarctic. He has plumbed the depths in a submarine and in 2007 he experienced weightlessness during a zero-gravity flight, routine training for astronauts. On his return to ground he quipped “Space, here I come.”

Writing years later on his website, Professor Hawking said: “I have had motor neurone disease for practically all my adult life. Yet it has not prevented me from having a very attractive family and being successful in my work. I have been lucky that my condition has progressed more slowly than is often the case. But it shows that one need not lose hope.”

At a conference In Cambridge held in celebration of his 75th birthday in 2017, Professor Hawking said “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research into theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 50 years, and I’m happy if I’ve made a small contribution.”

And he said he wanted others to feel the passion he has for understanding the universal laws that govern us all. “I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm about this quest. So remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious, and however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”

Words: Tom Kirk, Sarah Collins

Images: Alan Fersht, Graham CopeKoga, Andre Pattenden, Sir Cam, Dan White

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Stephen Hawking

Introduction.

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. He studied at the University of Oxford and earned a bachelor’s degree from there in 1962. When Hawking was 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—a disease that weakens muscles and causes paralysis. Despite his diagnosis, he continued to work. He earned a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1966.

As a cosmologist, Hawking studied the basic laws that govern the universe. One of his theories was that mini black holes were formed following the big bang . These mini black holes contain one billion tons of mass but occupy less than the space of an atom . Hawking’s work inspired others to investigate the properties of black holes.

Hawking became a professor at Cambridge in 1977. Two years later he was appointed Lucasian professor of mathematics, a post once held by Isaac Newton . In 2009 he was named the Director of Research for the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge.

Hawking earned many honors and awards, including many honorary degrees. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1974, as one of its youngest fellows. He was made a Commander of the British Empire in 1982. In 2006 Hawking received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society, and he was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. Hawking died on March 14, 2018, in Cambridge.

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7 Fascinating Facts About Stephen Hawking

In honor of his inspiring endurance, and his immense contributions to the understanding of the cosmos that swirls around us, here are seven facts about the life of this otherworldly scientist:

He was an average student in elementary school

Hawking didn’t have the sort of sparkling early academic career you'd expect from a Grade-A genius. He claimed he didn't learn to properly read until he was 8 years old, and his grades never surpassed the average scores of his classmates at St. Albans School. Of course, there was a reason those same classmates nicknamed him "Einstein"; Hawking built a computer with friends as a teenager and demonstrated a tremendous capacity for grasping issues of space and time. He also got it together when it counted, dominating his Oxford entrance exams to score a scholarship to study physics at age 17.

Upon his ALS diagnosis, Hawking was told he only had two-and-a-half years to live

After falling while ice skating during his first year as a grad student at Cambridge University, Hawking was told he had the degenerative motor neuron disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and had only two-and-a-half years to live. Obviously that prognosis was light years off, but it seems early onset of the disease was a blessing in disguise, of sorts. Most ALS patients are diagnosed in their mid-50s and live another two to five years, but those diagnosed earlier tend to have a slower-progressing form of the disease. Furthermore, the loss of motor skills forced the burgeoning cosmologist to become more creative. "By losing the finer dexterity of my hands, I was forced to travel through the universe in my mind and try to visualize the ways in which it worked," he later noted.

He was initially puzzled by his own equation

Hawking's equation, which involves the speed of light, Newton’s constant and other symbols that make the non-mathematically inclined run for cover, measures emissions from black holes that today is known as Hawking radiation. Hawking was initially puzzled by these findings, as he believed black holes to be celestial death traps that swallowed up all energy. However, he determined there was room for this phenomenon through the merging of quantum theory, general relativity and thermodynamics, distilling it all into one (relatively) simple but elegant formula in 1974. Already known for establishing important ground rules about the properties of black holes, this discovery kicked his career into a higher gear and set him on the path to stardom. Hawking later said he would like this equation to be carved on his tombstone.

Hawking almost died in 1985

Although the doomsday predictions of his early doctors were off, Hawking did almost die after contracting pneumonia while traveling to Geneva in 1985. While he was unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator, the option of removing the fragile scientist from life support was being considered until his then-wife, Jane, rejected the idea. Hawking instead underwent a tracheotomy, an operation that helped him breathe but permanently took away his ability to speak, prompting the creation of his famous speech synthesizer.

He considered his non-descript computer voice part of his identity

Hawking's original synthesizer was created by a California-based company called Words Plus, which ran a speech program called Equalizer on an Apple II computer. Adapted to a portable system that could be mounted on a wheelchair, the program enabled Hawking to "speak" by using a hand clicker to choose words on a screen. After he eventually lost use of his hands, Hawking had an infrared switch mounted on his glasses that generated words by detecting cheek movement. He also had the communication technology overhauled by Intel, though he insisted on retaining the same robotic voice with its distinctly non-British accent he'd been using for three decades, as he considered it an indelible part of his identity.

Hawking wrote books using his vocal synthesizer

Hawking long believed he could write a book about the mysteries of the universe that would connect with the public, a task that seemed all but impossible after he lost the abilities to write and speak. However, he painstakingly pressed forward with his speech synthesizer, receiving valuable assistance from students who relayed draft revisions with his editor in the United States via speakerphone. Hawking's vision ultimately was realized, as A Brief History of Time landed on the London Sunday Times best-seller list for 237 weeks after its publication in 1988. He went on to pen an autobiography, several other books about his field and a series of science-themed novels, co-written with his daughter, Lucy.

He had a wicked sense of humor

Despite his extraordinary physical challenges, Hawking wasn't shy about appearing on television. He first appeared as himself on a 1993 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation , cracking jokes while playing poker with Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton . He also lent his voice to the animated shows The Simpsons and Futurama , and, fittingly, surfaced on the hit sitcom The Big Bang Theory . Of course, screen time wasn’t only about laughs for the world-renowned physicist, who returned to his bread-and-butter topics of cosmology and the origins of life for his six-part 1997 miniseries Stephen Hawking's Universe . He also provided plenty of stark, sobering descriptions of his life for the 2013 documentary Hawking .

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Stephen Hawking: A timeline of his life

The renowned physicist died aged 76.

14 March, 2018

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Here are 10 key dates in the life of renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking, who died Wednesday at the age 76:

- January 8, 1942: He is born in the city of Oxford.

- 1962: With a degree in physics from the University of Oxford, he undertakes research in cosmology at Cambridge, completing a doctorate thesis entitled "Properties of the Expanding Universes".

- 1963: He learns that he suffers from a form of the degenerative and paralysing motor-neurone disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

- 1965: He marries Jane Wilde, with whom he has three children before they separate after 25 years. In 1995 he marries his former nurse, Elaine Mason; they too divorce after several years.

- 1974: He becomes at 32 one of the youngest members of the Royal Society, Britain's most prestigious scientific body.

____________

Stephen Hawking dies aged 76

Dr Jane Hawking: Her own theory on it all

Stephen Hawking and his five-decade fight with ALS

- 1979: He is appointed Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, a post he occupies for 30 years.

- 1985: He loses the ability to speak after undergoing a tracheotomy to help him breathe after contracting pneumonia. This results eventually in his use of a computer and a voice synthesiser to communicate.

- 1988: Hawking publishes A Brief History of Time , which seeks to explain to non-scientists the fundamental theories of the universe. It becomes an international bestseller, bringing him global acclaim.

- 2007: He goes on a weightless flight in the United States as a prelude to a hoped-for sub-orbital spaceflight.

- 2014: The Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything , by director James Marsh, is released. British actor Eddie Redmayne goes on to win an Oscar for his portrayal of the scientist.

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Stephen Hawking

• Occupation: Scientist and astrophysicist
• Born: January 8, 1942 in Oxford, United Kingdom
• Died: March 14, 2018 in Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Best known for: Hawking radiation and the book A Brief History of Time

• He was born on the 300th anniversary of the death of the famous scientist Galileo .
• He has been married twice and has three children.
• Stephen has been on several TV shows including The Simpsons and the Big Bang Theory .
• The book A Brief History of Time only has one equation, Einstein's famous E = mc 2 .
• Hawking has co-written several children's books with his daughter Lucy including George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt and George and the Big Bang .
• He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
• He hoped to travel to space one day and trained with NASA on their zero gravity aircraft.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

• 16:33 - Aug 14, 2024

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Stephen Hawking: A Biography

• By Bryan Keithley
• March 9, 2024
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K ristine Larsen begins her biography of Stephen Hawking with a central question: how has a theoretical physicist known for “esoteric mathematics” and “the secret language of general relativity” become a cultural icon and the most recognizable scientist in the world? While the author still grapples with the same question by the end of this brief volume, Stephen Hawking: A Biography provides a capably concise view of the enigmatic genius, packing a remarkable amount of material into a few chapters. However, the book’s very brevity denies the reader a true appreciation for Hawking’s accomplishments, genius, and inner life. Hawking’s popular science book A Brief History of Time was criticized for its pedantry and impenetrability; quite the opposite charge could be leveled at Larsen’s biography of the man. This is light reading that doesn’t do quite enough justice to its heady subject.

Larsen proceeds in conventional chronological fashion, detailing Hawking’s birth to Oxford-educated parents and his “eccentric” upbringing. For example, his family raised bees in the basement and drove a secondhand London taxicab, among other peculiarities. Larsen next details Hawking’s time at Oxford University—his poor study habits but brilliant output, his career indecisiveness, his preference for rowing in the Boat Club over homework assignments—until his graduate studies at Cambridge. These and other events are handled in the book with matter-of-fact conciseness. Next comes Hawking’s unfortunate slide into physical disability, starting with warning signs like stomach aches and clumsiness, and climaxing with a fall down a flight of stairs. Increasing accidents prompted Hawking to seek medical attention, resulting in the devastating diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, a disease the scientist has battled for decades despite its debilitating (and degenerative) physical effects. However, readers looking for an emotional or inspirational survivor’s story will be disappointed; Larsen’s narrative steams ahead at a fixed, breezy pace, leaving little time to lament Hawking’s condition or laud his courage in dealing with it.

This is not to say, however, that the biography does not cover the wide range necessary for a complex picture. Larsen establishes the cosmology controversy of the early 1960s over big bang versus steady-state theories of the universe, a debate Hawking helped to quell. Hawking’s home life and the extraordinary sacrifices of his wife, Jane, are also covered. There is a discussion of Hawking’s place both among his peers and in popular culture, especially after the runaway success of A Brief History of Time . There are also the stories behind Hawking’s most astonishing theories, such as black hole radiation, the “no-hair” theorem to describe black holes, and the no-boundary proposal to describe the universe. A Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Central Connecticut State University, Dr. Larsen is especially qualified to make the opacity of theoretical physics more transparent to the layperson. Indeed, the author excels at this task.

What is missing from the book is any sense of Hawking’s genius or greatness. Larsen’s untangling of difficult scientific concepts serves entirely descriptive purposes. She conveys no awe or wonder in Hawking’s accomplishments, and little regard for the audacity of his intellect. Instead, she overwhelms the reader with a laundry list of this honorary doctorate or that television appearance, painstakingly charts the scientist’s career trajectory, papers, and conferences, but misses the essence of Hawking’s charisma or the astounding implications of his work. Kristine Larsen’s Stephen Hawking: A Biography is ultimately a kind of Cliff’s Notes approach to the famous physicist: useful, but perfunctory.

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'Physics itself disappears': How theoretical physicist Thomas Hertog helped Stephen Hawking produce his final, most radical theory of everything

Thomas Hertog tells us how he collaborated with Stephen Hawking on his final theorem — a Darwinian revolution in physics that explains the origin of time.

In 2002, Thomas Hertog, then a theoretical physics graduate student, stepped inside Stephen Hawking's office at the University of Cambridge and saw his supervisor's eyes filled with emotion. 

Hawking's news was also a confession. The famed physicist told his student that his book, "A Brief History of Time," was wrong because it predicted a barren universe unsuitable for life, and he wanted Hertog to help him find a new theory.

So, in the last 16 years of Hawking's life, the duo, along with collaborator James Hartle , developed a new explanation for how our universe came to be. 

Live Science sat down with Hertog, now a professor at KU Leuven in Belgium, to discuss his new book " On the Origin of Time" (Penguin Random House, 2024), his decades-long collaboration with Hawking, and the mind-bending Darwinian view of the universe's origins that their work ultimately produced. 

Ben Turner: When you met Stephen Hawking, he was beginning to think that the picture of the universe's origins he had previously presented in "A Brief History of Time" was flawed, and he wanted to look for a new theory. For readers who might not know, what is the standard conception of how our universe began?

Thomas Hertog: Certainly what's standard is that there's been some sort of Big Bang — a violent, extremely odd beginning. What's been challenging is to describe what exactly happened at the Big Bang. 

What's the novelty of Hawking's contribution in "A Brief History of Time?" What was the key insight he invoked? He came up with a mathematical model of the actual beginning in his famous "no boundary proposal," in which the Big Bang is a true origin. 

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Sadly, Hawking's model didn't produce a habitable universe. It was, instead, an empty universe — without stars, without galaxies and without life. So, as you say, by the late '90s, Hawking realized there was a problem with his model. 

BT: A popular answer for how our habitable universe could have formed is that the Big Bang led to eternal cosmic inflation with different pockets of expanding space-time — a multiverse — and that our universe just happens to be one of the pockets where the laws of physics balanced out in just the right way to produce life. Why didn't this idea suit Hawking? 

TH: These multiverse models are not falsifiable, even in principle. That's not because we can't look at the early universe and check it out; it's because multiverse models do not make unambiguous predictions of what we should see in this universe. 

Related: Stephen Hawking wanted scientists to 'make black holes' on Earth. Physics says it's possible.  

BT: So how did you and Hawking meet and begin to collaborate? You met him when you were a master's student. What was that like? He was already a legend by this time. 

TH: Yes, he was already pretty famous. I met him because, well, I grew up in Belgium, and there was no cosmology going on in Belgium in the late '90s. Stephen and his colleagues, Martin Rees and those folks, had established a kind of mecca for cosmology at Cambridge. So I had a professor who told me, "Look, if you're into cosmology, go to Cambridge."

At Cambridge, it was very well known that whoever came top of the master's class would get an invitation to go talk to Stephen, and that's what happened [to me]. So he took me on as his PhD student. 

But, of course, the real collaboration started later, when we found ourselves on the same scientific wavelength and interested in the deeper problems to do with the Big Bang. It just happened: You find yourselves on the same wavelength, interested in the same problems, perhaps sharing some sort of intuition. As theoretical physicists, you're always performing thought experiments on each other, and after a while, you develop a common understanding.

BT: Past theories of the Big Bang have framed the universe as if they're looking at it from an "objective," godlike perspective. The theory you and Hawking began working on shifted that perspective to one more like our own — an observer somewhere in the universe. That made you take quantum mechanics , as well as string theory, as your starting point. What did beginning this way teach you? 

TH: When you take a God's-eye of the universe, you are going to be looking for a prior explanation of why the entire cosmos should be doing what it's doing — some Platonic mathematical truth that looms over the entire universe. 

But when you take what you call a more human perspective, a perspective of an observer within the universe, it's very different. You'll be taking a more historical perspective. You're not asking, "Why should the universe be this way?" but "How did it all come about?" 

If you use quantum mechanics to reconstruct that history all the way back to the Big Bang, that historical perspective begins to play out at the level of the laws of physics themselves. And that's, of course, a surprise. We thought the laws of physics were fixed and immutable, but if you go back in time, they begin to simplify. In a sense, they begin to evaporate, even the structure. 

That structure, encoded in the laws of physics, begins to disappear until ultimately — and this is the crux of our hypothesis — even the distinction between time and space blurs. The laws of our universe's evolution, the standard laws of physics, close themselves; they cease to be. Physics itself disappears. 

It's a Darwinian turning. In biology, we go back along the tree of life to life's origin, and the laws of biology also disappear. That's because those laws are emergent properties of biological evolution. We claim that the laws of physics are also emergent properties of a much earlier evolution. 

BT: That's going to strike people as very strange. In biology, selective pressure plays the role of spurring biological laws to evolve. What's causing physical laws to evolve?

TH: The act of observation in quantum mechanics. You're going to ask me, "But wait a minute — who's observing?" Because clearly, in the early universe, there is no human observer. But we all know that the act of observation in quantum mechanics comes from the environment itself — it's the interactions between the particles and the forces. 

Even a single photon can perform an act of observation in quantum mechanics. It can convert a range of possible histories into a tangible, concrete reality. 

BT: According to your theory, when we wind time back to the Big Bang, physical laws fold in on themselves and time itself loses its identity — that gives it an origin point. Einstein particularly disliked this notion. Why did he object to it?

TH: When Einstein and his contemporaries were running the evolution of the universe backwards in time, they were doing this using Einstein's own theory in a classical, deterministic manner. They ran into what they call the singularity [where the equations describing the universe broke down]. The origin of time, the Big Bang, seemed to not be part of science. 

Related: Tweak to Schrödinger's cat equation could unite Einstein's relativity and quantum mechanics, study hints

When Stephen and I ran the evolution of the universe backwards, we did it in a quantum mechanical way. This agrees with Einstein until you reach the earlier stages where our picture is very, very different. The laws of physics never really break down [in Hertog, Hartle and Hawking's picture]; they just gradually disappear. I think Einstein would be okay with that.

BT: Key to your idea of time having an origin is that it's an emergent property from the interactions of many quantum particles at the edge of the observable universe. The universe is like a disk expanding outward, and at the edge of that disk are qubits, particles containing all the universe's information. The play of these particles beams time into our universe from that furthest edge — like a cosmic hologram. Can you explain the holographic principle a bit more? 

TH: So the way we read the past of the universe is from a holographic perspective. The holographic screen is an abstract representation of our reality, and as we zoom out further and further from that screen, it corresponds to going back in time. The picture gets more coarse-grained, you lose information, you lose pixels, and the Big Bang is the limit where you run out of information. The beginning of the world is really an epistemic horizon where science (from the holographic perspective) simply doesn't reach further back. 

And, of course, that fits in very well with the story that I told you earlier — that the laws of physics, along with time and space, disappear as we reach the Big Bang, the origin of physics. The holographic implementation of our vision made it click together. 

That's how theoretical physics works. In retrospect, you start off with a lot of intuition, and you mold this into a mathematical framework that is consistent and that allows you to ultimately predict new phenomena. This is where current research is going: How can we test this model? How can we find fossils of this very early evolution? 

BT: That's actually my next question.

TH: [Laughs] I feared. 

BT: So where can we look? Before the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the universe was completely opaque. How do we peer beyond that microwave fuzz?

TH: The cosmic microwave background gives you a picture of the universe 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when it became transparent . But this early phase of evolution that I'm talking about happens much sooner, so you have to peer through [the CMB]. And you can't do this with light, electromagnetic waves.

But gravitational waves go through everything, so you can hope to look further backward. In principle, there's no limit — you can look all the way back to the Big Bang and unlock this deeper layer of evolution. 

BT: Say we are able to. What might we see?

TH: We've hypothesized. How? Well, the way I envision this early stage is a little bit like a branching, diversifying tree of physical laws. Each of these branchings is really the birth of a new kind of force — one force splits into two with new particles and more structure. Some of these branches are pretty violent, coming with bursts of gravitational waves which are not localized to one place and appearing as background radiation, much like the cosmic microwave background . 

It's the entire universe transitioning into a new state when it cools and expands, and it's accompanied by a strong burst of inflation. 

BT: Your theory describes physical laws evolving quickly when the universe was dense and hot, and there were plenty of interactions or "observations" between particles. But if these laws still have the capacity to evolve, does that have any implications for how the universe ends?

TH: The short answer is, of course, that I don't know. But if you challenge me a little bit, I can say something very speculative: If the laws of physics were not determined, fixed and immutable in the past, it's natural to expect they won't be eternal. So, even though that evolution is suppressed now (because the universe is cold), it's not infinitely suppressed. It's not gone.

BT: We've spoken a lot about intuition in physics. The one you shared with Hawking fueled this collaboration and enabled you to finish your theory, even as Hawking slowly lost his ability to use his artificial voice. How did you do that?

TH: It's a little bit like being in a marriage, right? Or really any long-term relationship — you can guess one another's thoughts. Towards the end, that happened to us, as well. We developed an intimacy when it came to cosmology and its fundamental problems. In the later stages, we developed a nonverbal layer of communication in which I could fire yes-or-no questions at Stephen and read his facial expressions. 

This developed in a fairly spontaneous manner, but it was only possible because, in the late '90s and early '00s, we had some very good years in which Stephen could speak fairly fluently through his speech synthesizer. He really dragged me into his thinking about these paradoxes associated with the multiverse.

— After 2 years in space, the James Webb Space Telescope has broken cosmology. Can it be fixed? — James Webb telescope discovers oldest black hole in the universe — James Webb telescope discovers earliest galaxy in the known universe — and its shockingly big

BT: Do you think his ability to move outside problems and intuit them is what made him such a great physicist?

TH: Stephen's intuition was grounded in 15 years of doing a lot of calculations. It didn't come to him from heaven. It was rooted in the early stages of his career. 

Of course, there's something genius that happened in the early '80s, when he lost his ability to write equations. He had the capacity and the stubbornness to retrain himself to perform theoretical physics in a very unique way. It was more intuition-based, more distant from the equations than others, and with the ability to visualize shapes and geometries in his head. His true glory lies in that, with this new language, he was able to arrive at certain discoveries which were very difficult to reproduce with equations.

Editor's note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory $16.79 on Amazon

If you enjoyed this interview with Thomas Hertog, you can read more about the final theory he developed in close collaboration with famed physicist Stephen Hawking in his new book, "On the Origin of Time." It's a clear tour of the truly mind-bending concept at the heart of Hawking's last work.

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Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like weird animals and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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• orsobubu why hawking's face, lately, after 2000, was so incredibly different than the 80s and 90s? There is something very strange and very wrong in all this story; and this, without considering that the whole quantum mechanics stuff is fishy from the bottom up Reply
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Stephen Hawking shared final warning for humanity shortly before he died

Professor stephen hawking opened up about his thoughts on the end of humanity before his death in 2018.

Professor Stephen Hawking is considered to be one of the best theoretical physicists in history.

His work on the structure of the universe and the Big Bang was seriously revolutionary at the time.

Hawking passed away aged 76 in March 2018, but his work - and legacy - certainly lives on.

Though before he died, the physicist issued a final warning for humanity and it seems he was ahead of curb this whole time.

In 2014, he told the BBC that ‘the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race’.

He predicted that AI would surpass human intelligence and, I mean, the warning signs are already there.

Only recently, have people been using ChatGPT to pass law exams, create business ideas and write code.

Hawking went on: "It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate.

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

In 2015, he was also one of 100 experts to sign an open letter to the United Nations warning of the dangers of unchecked AI development.

He was joined by SpaceX founder Elon Musk in a bid to create stringent rules for AI.

Then, one year before he died, Hawking warned mankind about the dangers of allowing AI to grow further during an interview with Wired magazine.

He said : “I fear AI may replace humans altogether."

Let’s be honest, if a man as smart as Hawking is telling us that AI could bring upon the end of times, we should probably listen to him.

At one point, he even suggested that we could become as dumb as rocks compared to machines if we don’t stay sharp in his book , Brief Answers to the Big Questions , published after his death.

Hawking wrote: "We may face an intelligence explosion that ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails.

"It’s tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction, but this would be a mistake - and potentially our worst mistake ever."

He’s not exactly wrong, though.

If we look at the state of the digital era we are currently living in, AI has exploded at a rapid pace. What will it be like in 20 years after being fed a wealth of knowledge and data?

We can only hope it does more good than harm.

Topics:  Artificial Intelligence , Stephen Hawking , Technology

Anish is a GG2 Young Journalist of the Year 2024 finalist. He has a Master's degree in Multimedia Journalism and a Bachelor's degree in International Business Management. Apart from that, his life revolves around the ‘Four F’s’ - family, friends, football and food. Email: [email protected]

@ Anish_Vij

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