Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s most famous scientists, unexpectedly reaches his 75th birthday in spite of a terrible neurological disease.
Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most famous, and most respected, scientists in the world. He has made incredible scientific discoveries. Yet he can't walk or speak, and communicates using a computer and one muscle in his face.
Hawking is a physicist and mathematician. He specialises in cosmology, the study of the universe. His most famous theory is about black holes. Most physicists are anonymous experts, working in laboratories. Their theories seem very difficult for ordinary people to understand. Hawking is very rare: a brilliant physicist, respected by the scientific community, who can communicate scientific theory in a way ordinary people understand. Oh, and he has a super-cool computerised voice.
Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on 8 January 1942.
At school, his nickname was "Einstein". His friends knew he was good at science but they didn't know how good he was.
He studied Physics at Oxford University, and then went to Cambridge University to study for his doctorate in Cosmology.
There, at the age of 21, he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease, a neurological condition. The doctors thought he had two years to live. But Professor Hawking married, had three children, and made major scientific discoveries.
In 2017, he celebrated his 75th birthday.
He is still a Cambridge professor and continues his research. He also helps explain science to non-scientists. His book A Brief History of Time, a (relatively) simple guide to cosmology, is a bestseller: 10 million copies!
Professor Hawking's work on black holes is a continuation of work by Einstein on relativity and Isaac Newton on gravity. (At just 35, Hawking became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post that was created for Newton.) His discoveries helped prove the Big Bang theory of the creation of the universe.
Stephen Hawking has survived much longer with Motor Neurone Disease that any other patient. But it has seriously affected him. He has slowly lost the use of almost all his muscles. In 1985, he lost the ability to speak. He learned to choose letters on a computer screen to create words and sentences.
A synthetic computer voice then says his words. His communication technology is more sophisticated now but he chooses to keep the old synthetic voice that is now recognisable all over the world.
Some scientists think that Professor Hawking's disability helped his scientific discoveries: he developed a system to visualise complex concepts because he couldn't write or do experiments. He found new connections and ideas simply by thinking about them. He says himself, "My disability has probably given me more time than most people to pursue the quest for knowledge."
Professor Hawking has spent his professional life studying the stars and space, and he is a big science-fiction fan. He celebrated his 65th birthday discovering zero-gravity in a NASA plane. One of his favourite achievements is appearing on Star Trek. And he spent his 75th birthday in typical style: watching Star Wars Rogue One!
The film The Theory of Everything , released in 2014, pays tribute to this exceptional man, played by Eddie Redmayne who won a Golden Globe, an Oscar and a BAFTA Award for his outstanding performance.
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(adapted from SpeakEasy)