Stephen William Hawking born 8 January 1942
The life cycle 1 2 4 8 7 5
Important years of life
1951 7
1958 5
1963 1
1964 2
1966 4
1970 8
1978 7
1985 5
1990 1
1991 2
1993 4
1997 8
2005 7
2012 5
2017 1
2018 2
2020 4
2024 8
2032 7
2039 5
1951 The Albert Einstein Award (sometimes mistakenly called the Albert Einstein Medal because it was accompanied with a gold medal) was an award in theoretical physics that was established to recognize high achievement in the natural sciences…Stephen Hawking received the award in 1978.
…From 1958 on, with the help of the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, they built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components…
…Hawking had experienced increasing clumsiness during his final year at Oxford, including a fall on some stairs and difficulties when rowing. The problems worsened, and his speech became slightly slurred; his family noticed the changes when he returned home for Christmas, and medical investigations were begun.
The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, in 1963.
At the time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years…
Hawking started developing a reputation for brilliance and brashness when he publicly challenged the work of Fred Hoyle and his student Jayant Narlikar at a lecture in June 1964…
When Hawking was a graduate student at Cambridge, his relationship with Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister whom he had met shortly before his diagnosis with motor neurone disease, continued to develop. The couple became engaged in October 1964. Hawking later said that the engagement gave him “something to live for”…
The Adams Prize is one of the most prestigious prizes awarded by the University of Cambridge. The Adams Prize is awarded each year by the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and St John’s College to a UK based mathematician for distinguished research in the Mathematical Sciences. Stephen Hawking received the Adams Prize in 1966.
In 1970 they published a proof that if the universe obeys the general theory of relativity and fits any of the models of physical cosmology developed by Alexander Friedmann, then it must have begun as a singularity…
In 1970, Hawking postulated what became known as the second law of black hole dynamics, that the event horizon of a black hole can never get smaller…
Hawking was appointed to the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished visiting professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1970. He worked with a friend on the faculty, Kip Thorne,[103] and engaged him in a scientific wager about whether the dark star Cygnus X-1 was a black hole. The wager was an “insurance policy” against the proposition that black holes did not exist.Hawking acknowledged that he had lost the bet in 1990, which was the first of several that he was to make with Thorne and others….
During their first years of marriage, Jane lived in London during the week as she completed her degree, and they travelled to the United States several times for conferences and physics-related visits. The couple had difficulty finding housing that was within Hawking’s walking distance to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).
Jane began a PhD programme, and a son, Robert, was born in May 1967 ( The child was conceived in 1966 ).
A daughter, Lucy, was born in 1970. ( 2 November 1970 )
A third child, Timothy, was born in April 1979 ( The child was conceived in 1978 )
The Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) is the highest award given by the RAS. The RAS Council have “complete freedom as to the grounds on which it is awarded” and as such it can be awarded for any reason.
He received further academic recognition, including five more honorary degrees,the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985)….
During a visit to CERN on the border of France and Switzerland in mid-1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia, which in his condition was life-threatening; he was so ill that Jane was asked if life support should be terminated. She refused, but the consequence was a tracheotomy, which would require round-the-clock nursing care and remove what remained of his speech. The National Health Service was ready to pay for a nursing home, but Jane was determined that he would live at home. The cost of the care was funded by an American foundation. Nurses were hired for the three shifts required to provide the round-the-clock support he required. One of those employed was Elaine Mason, who was to become Hawking’s second wife…
…By the 1980s, Hawking’s marriage had been strained for many years. Jane felt overwhelmed by the intrusion into their family life of the required nurses and assistants. The impact of his celebrity was challenging for colleagues and family members, while the prospect of living up to a worldwide fairytale image was daunting for the couple.Hawking’s views of religion also contrasted with her strong Christian faith and resulted in tension. In the late 1980s, Hawking had grown close to one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, to the dismay of some colleagues, caregivers, and family members, who were disturbed by her strength of personality and protectiveness. Hawking told Jane that he was leaving her for Mason[230] and departed the family home in February 1990…
….In 1997, he conceded a 1991 public scientific wager made with Kip Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech. Hawking had bet that Penrose’s proposal of a “cosmic censorship conjecture” – that there could be no “naked singularities” unclothed within a horizon – was correct…
Hawking pursued his work in physics: in 1993 he co-edited a book on Euclidean quantum gravity with Gary Gibbons and published a collected edition of his own articles on black holes and the Big Bang…A popular-level collection of essays, interviews, and talks titled Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays was published in 1993, and a six-part television series Stephen Hawking’s Universe and a companion book appeared in 1997. As Hawking insisted, this time the focus was entirely on science…
Hawking continued his writings for a popular audience, publishing The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001, and A Briefer History of Time, which he wrote in 2005 with Leonard Mlodinow to update his earlier works with the aim of making them accessible to a wider audience, and God Created the Integers, which appeared in 2006…
Hawking gradually lost the use of his hand, and in 2005 he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles, with a rate of about one word per minute…
As part of another longstanding scientific dispute, Hawking had emphatically argued, and bet, that the Higgs boson would never be found. The particle was proposed to exist as part of the Higgs field theory by Peter Higgs in 1964. Hawking and Higgs engaged in a heated and public debate over the matter in 2002 and again in 2008, with Higgs criticising Hawking’s work and complaining that Hawking’s “celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have.” The particle was discovered in July 2012 at CERN following construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Hawking quickly conceded that he had lost his bet[184][185] and said that Higgs should win the Nobel Prize for Physics, which he did in 2013…
On 20 July 2015, Hawking helped launch Breakthrough Initiatives, an effort to search for extraterrestrial life.
In 2015, Richard Branson offered Stephen Hawking a seat on the Virgin Galactic spaceship for free. While no hard date has been set for launch, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo is slated to launch at the end of 2017. At 75, Hawking will not be the oldest person ever to go to space (John Glenn returned to space at age 77), but he will be the first person to go to space with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). While this will be Hawking’s first time in space, it will not be the first time he will have experienced weightlessness: in 2007, he had flown into zero gravity aboard a specially-modified Boeing 727-200 aircraft.Hawking created Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth, a documentary on space colonization, as a summer 2017 episode of Tomorrow’s World…
14 March 2018