Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking did his best work while losing the use of his body and became the most famous scientist since Einstein. Born in Oxford in 1942, the son of a tropical medicine researcher, he was an unremarkable schoolboy nicknamed Einstein, read physics at Oxford with an estimated thousand hours of work in three years, and moved to Cambridge for a doctorate in cosmology. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at twenty-one and given about two years to live. He said afterwards that the expectation of dying young made him work. His doctoral work, with Roger Penrose, applied Penrose's singularity theorem to the universe as a whole and showed that general relativity implies the universe began in a singularity — that the theory predicts its own breakdown at the beginning. His major result came in 1974. Combining quantum field theory with the geometry of black holes, he showed that they are not entirely black: particle pairs at the event horizon allow energy to escape, so a black hole radiates and eventually evaporates. Hawking radiation was deeply unexpected, is generally accepted, and has never been observed. It raised the information paradox — whether what falls in is destroyed — which he argued about for decades and conceded a bet on in 2004. A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, sold over ten million copies. He lost his speech after a tracheotomy in 1985 and used a cheek-operated synthesiser whose American accent he refused to update. He held Newton's chair at Cambridge for thirty years and died in 2018, having lived fifty-five years past his prognosis.
- Lived: 1942 CE – 2018 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: physicist, writer
