“Your illness does not define you.
Your strength and courage
does”
Validating these
lines, today the “HERO” on wheelchair that travels through the universe in
his mind left for his heavenly abode.
Professor
Stephen William Hawking was born on 8th January 1942 in Oxford, England, during
second world war, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo. Hawking
didn’t have the sort of sparkling early academic career like any Grade-A
genius. He even didn't learn to properly read until he was 8 years old, and his
grades were average at St. Albans School but he was nick named as
“Einstein" due to his creative mind. Later, contrary to his father’s
profession and choice for medicine, he pursued physics University College,
Oxford and post graduation from Cambridge University. During his first year at
Cambridge University, shortly after his 21st birthday he fell down
while ice skating and was diagnosed with “Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)”,
the disease robbed him of mobility and speech. Despite of incredible hurdles in form of loss
of motor skills, wheelchair-boundation and dependency on a computerized voice
system the budding cosmologist was turning more creative. After that Sir
Hawking joined research in cosmology at the Department of
Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge and worked on the
“Properties of Expanding Universe” In 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, and continued his goal of “complete understanding
of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all."
Stephen Hawking authored
122 books on
goodreads, the most popular book is A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby
Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design and My Brief History
and numbers of worthy publications
His main contribution to the field of
physics and cosmology lie in the studies of:
-
The
origins of the universe
-
Time
- The
Big Bang theory
- The
universe began with a gravitational singularity
- Singularities
(gravitational and space/time continuum singularities) are more common in the
universe than we think
- Black
Hole radiation
- The
universe has no space/time boundaries
- There
is no god
Though it’s impossible to
sum up Hawking's life in one word, it can be done with one equation:
It’s a great loss to the scientific community but the thinking
of this superman will keep inspiration to many young minds. A
BIG “THANK YOU” to a scientist with towering
intellect, an infectious sense of humor and the greatest mind of the century.