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Subject: [IDA_CRPD_Forum] Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking, science's brightest star, dies aged 76



The physicist and author of A Brief History of Time has died at his home in Cambridge. His children said: 'We will miss him for ever'


 . Stephen Hawking obituary by Roger Penrose




Ian Sample Science editor

@iansample
Wed 14 Mar 2018 09.26 GMT First published on Wed 14 Mar 2018 03.46 GMT



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Cosmology's brightest star Stephen Hawking dies aged 76 - video
Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, 
whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global 
audiences in the millions, has died aged 76.

A brief history of Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time



Read more



His family released a statement in the early hours of Wednesday 
morning confirming his death at his home in Cambridge.

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."

For fellow scientists and loved ones, it was Hawking's intuition 
and wicked sense of humour that marked him out as much as the 
fierce intellect which, coupled with his illness, came to 
symbolise the unbounded possibilities of the human mind.

I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so 
much I want to do first

Stephen Hawking Hawking was driven to Wagner, but not the bottle, 
when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the 
age of 21. Doctors expected him to live for only two more years. 
But Hawking had a form of the disease that progressed more slowly 
than usual. He survived for more than half a century..

Hawking once estimated he worked only 1,000 hours during his 
three undergraduate years at Oxford. In his finals, he came 
borderline between a first and second class degree. Convinced 
that he was seen as a difficult student, he told his viva 
examiners that if they gave him a first he would move to 
Cambridge to pursue his PhD. Award a second and he threatened to 
stay. They opted for a first.

Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live 
most. For Hawking, the early diagnosis of his terminal disease, 
and witnessing the death from leukaemia of a boy he knew in 
hospital, ignited a fresh sense of purpose. "Although there was 
a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I 
was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to 
make progress with my research," he once said. Embarking on his 
career in earnest, he declared: "My goal is simple. It is a 
complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and 
why it exists at all."

He began to use crutches in the 1960s, but long fought the use of 
a wheelchair. When he finally relented, he became notorious for 
his wild driving along the streets of Cambridge, not to mention 
the intentional running over of students' toes and the 
occasional spin on the dance floor at college parties.

The life of Stephen Hawking - in pictures



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Hawking's first major breakthrough came in 1970, when he and 
Roger Penrose applied the mathematics of black holes to the 
universe and showed that a singularity, a region of infinite 
curvature in spacetime, lay in our distant past: the point from 
which came the big bang.

Penrose found he was able to talk with Hawking even as the 
latter's speech failed.. Hawking, he said, had an absolute 
determination not to let anything get in his way. "He thought he 
didn't have long to live, and he really wanted to get as much as 
he could done at that time."



There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that 
is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark

Stephen Hawking In 1974 Hawking drew on quantum theory to declare 
that black holes should emit heat and eventually pop out of 
existence. For normal-sized black holes, the process is extremely 
slow, but miniature black holes would release heat at a 
spectacular rate, eventually exploding with the energy of a 
million one-megaton hydrogen bombs.

His proposal that black holes radiate heat stirred up one of the 
most passionate debates in modern cosmology. Hawking argued that 
if a black hole could evaporate, all the information that fell 
inside over its lifetime would be lost forever. It contradicted 
one of the most basic laws of quantum mechanics, and plenty of 
physicists disagreed. Hawking came round to believing the more 
common, if no less baffling, explanation that information is 
stored at a black hole's event horizon, and encoded back into 
radiation as the black hole radiates.

Marika Taylor, a former student of Hawking's and now professor 
of theoretical physics at Southampton University, remembers how 
Hawking announced his U-turn on the information paradox to his 
students. He was discussing their work with them in the pub when 
Taylor noticed he was turning his speech synthesiser up to the 
max. "I'm coming out!" he bellowed. The whole pub turned 
around and looked at the group before Hawking turned the volume 
down and clarified the statement: "I'm coming out and admitting 
that maybe information loss doesn't occur." He had, Taylor 
said, "a wicked sense of humour."

Hawking's run of radical discoveries led to his election in 1974 
to the Royal Society at the young age of 32. Five years later, he 
became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, 
arguably Britain's most distinguished chair, and one formerly 
held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac, the latter 
one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics.

Hawking's seminal contributions continued through the 1980s. The 
theory of cosmic inflation holds that the fledgling universe went 
through a period of terrific expansion. In 1982, Hawking was 
among the first to show how quantum fluctuations - tiny 
variations in the distribution of matter - might give rise 
through inflation to the spread of galaxies in the universe. In 
these tiny ripples lay the seeds of stars, planets and life as we 
know it.

But it was A Brief History of Time that rocketed Hawking to 
stardom. Published for the first time in 1988, the title made the 
Guinness Book of Records after it stayed on the Sunday Times 
bestsellers list for an unprecedented 237 weeks. It sold 10m 
copies and was translated into 40 different languages. 
Nevertheless, wags called it the greatest unread book in history.


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Stephen Hawking's big ideas ... made simple Hawking married his 
college sweetheart, Jane Wilde, in 1965, two years after his 
diagnosis. She first set eyes on him in 1962, lolloping down the 
street in St Albans, his face down, covered by an unruly mass of 
brown hair. A friend warned her she was marrying into "a mad, 
mad family". With all the innocence of her 21 years, she trusted 
that Stephen would cherish her, she wrote in her 2013 book, 
Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen.

In 1985, during a trip to Cern, Hawking was taken to hospital 
with an infection. He was so ill that doctors asked Jane if they 
should withdraw life support. She refused, and Hawking was flown 
back to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge for a lifesaving 
tracheotomy. The operation saved his life but destroyed his 
voice. The couple had three children, but the marriage broke down 
in 1991. Hawking's progressive condition, his demands on Jane, 
and his refusal to discuss his illness, were destructive forces 
the relationship could not endure, she said. Jane wrote of him 
being "a child possessed of a massive and fractious ego," and 
how husband and wife became "master" and "slave".

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 Four years later, Hawking married Elaine Mason, 
one of the nurses employed to give him round-the-clock care. The 
marriage lasted 11 years, during which Cambridgeshire police 
investigated a series of alleged assaults on Hawking. The 
physicist denied that Elaine was involved, and refused to 
cooperate with police, who dropped the investigation.

Hawking was not, perhaps, the greatest physicist of his time, but 
in cosmology he was a towering figure. There is no perfect proxy 
for scientific worth, but Hawking won the Albert Einstein Award, 
the Wolf Prize, the Copley Medal, and the Fundamental Physics 
Prize. The Nobel prize, however, eluded him..

He was fond of scientific wagers, despite a knack for losing 
them. In 1975, he bet the US physicist Kip Thorne a subscription 
to Penthouse that the cosmic x-ray source Cygnus X-1 was not a 
black hole. He lost in 1990. In 1997, Hawking and Thorne bet John 
Preskill an encyclopaedia that information must be lost in black 
holes. Hawking conceded in 2004. In 2012, Hawking lost $100 to 
Gordon Kane for betting that the Higgs boson would not be 
discovered.

He lectured at the White House during the Clinton administration 
- his oblique references to the Monica Lewinsky episode evidently 
lost on those who screened his speech - and returned in 2009 to 
receive the presidential medal of freedom from Barack Obama. His 
life was played out in biographies and documentaries, most 
recently The Theory of Everything, in which Eddie Redmayne played 
him. He appeared on The Simpsons and played poker with Einstein 
and Newton on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He delivered 
gorgeous put-downs on The Big Bang Theory. "What do Sheldon 
Cooper and a black hole have in common?" Hawking asked the 
fictional Caltech physicist whose IQ comfortably outstrips his 
social skills. After a pause, the answer came: "They both 
suck."

Hawking has argued that for humanity to survive it must spread 
out into space, and has warned against the worst applications of 
artificial intelligence, including autonomous weapons.

Stephen Hawking - obituary by Roger Penrose



Read more



Hawking was happy to court controversy and was accused of being 
sexist and misogynist. He turned up at Stringfellows lap dancing 
club in 2003, and years later declared women "a complete 
mystery". In 2013, he boycotted a major conference in Israel on 
the advice of Palestinian academics.

Some of his most outspoken comments offended the religious. In 
his 2010 book, Grand Design, he declared that God was not needed 
to set the universe going, and in an interview with the Guardian 
a year later, dismissed the comforts of religious belief.

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when 
its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for 
broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of 
the dark," he said.

He spoke also of death, an eventuality that sat on a more distant 
horizon than doctors thought. "I'm not afraid of death, but 
I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he 
said.

What astounded those around him was how much he did achieve. He 
leaves three children, Robert, Lucy and Timothy, from his first 
marriage to Jane Wilde, and three grandchildren.



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