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Stephen Hawking

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Community Entry: Hawking's biography

Professor Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England. His father was actually based in London as a doctor and this birthplace is as a result of concerns about safety in wartime.

When he was eight years old the family moved to St. Albans, about 20 miles north of London. At St. Albans School where he attended after age 11 he did well but not appear to be amongst the brightest of students.

Hawking's father wanted him to study medicine at Oxford but he was more interested in Mathematics and it eventually transpired that in 1959 he began to study Physics, as University College, which was his father's old college, did not offer degree courses in Mathematics. Although he states in his autobiography that he did not do much work he was nevertheless awarded a first class honors degree in Natural Science in 1962.

He subsequently went on to do research in Cosmology at Cambridge. His life was complicated by his becoming aware of suffering from an illness that was diagnosed as the incurable disease ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). He was much discomfited by being advised that he would suffer a progressive loss of muscle control and that his life expectancy would be curtailed but with the support of family and friends, including Jane Wilde whom he later married, the progress of his illness slowed down, and he finished his Ph.D.

He worked in various research and teaching roles for a number of years. From 1965 to 1970 he, together with Roger Penrose of Birkbeck College, London, showed that there would be a Big Bang singularity by considering Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Between 1970 and 1974, Hawking concentrated his studies on black holes. He combined Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity into the theory of Hawking Radiation in 1974.

In 1979 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. This professorship had previously been held by a number of particularly eminent mathematicians including Isaac Newton (1664-1669) and Charles Babbage (1828-1839).

In 1983 Hawking and Jim Hurtle of the University of California at Santa Barbara suggested that there is no edge for space and time though they are finite in extent . This implies that the laws of science would be able to determine how the universe had begun!

In 1985 Hawking was unfortunate in contracting a bout of pneumonia that necessitated a tracheotomy operation which removed his powers of speech. Amongst other things this eventuality obviously gave rise to further serious inconvenience in his professional life. The situation was relieved by the fitting of a small portable computer and a speech synthesizer to his wheelchair by David Mason of Cambridge. This arrangement however resulted in the English physicist Stephen Hawking now communicating with a Cyborg-American accent.

Overcoming the obstacle of his illness, Professor Hawking has made great very significant contributions in Physics and has received many awards, medals and prizes worldwide. So far he has been awarded 12 honorary degrees. He received his Commander of the British Empire (CBE) title in 1982 and the Companion of Honor (CH) in 1989. He is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life (he has three children and grandchildren are arriving), and his research into theoretical physics together with an extensive programme of travel and public lectures. He spends about three months of the year outside the United Kingdom and delivers lectures around the world.

Professor Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.

His many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G.F.R. Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W. Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W. Israel. Stephen Hawking has two popular books published; his best seller A Brief History of Time, and his later book, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays.

In addition to his PBS television show, he has appeared in several science fiction shows as a cameo character, most notably as a holodeck version of himself on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Stephen Hawking's Universe: The PBS show

This wonderful show opened with these quotes:

“Where do we come from? How did the universe begin? Why is the universe the way it is? How will it end?”

“All my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to wonder what makes the universe exist.  The questions are clear, and deceptively simple. But the answers have always seemed well beyond our reach. Until now.”

“The ideas which had grown over two thousand years of observation have had to be radically revised.  In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves.  From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy itself is just one of billions of galaxies, in a universe that is infinite and expanding. But this is far from the end of a long history of inquiry. Huge questions remain to be answered, before we can hope to have a complete picture of the universe we live in.”

“I want you to share my excitement at the discoveries, past and present, which have revolutionized the way we think. From the Big Bang to black holes, from dark matter to a possible Big Crunch, our image of the universe today is full of strange sounding ideas, and remarkable truths. The story of how we arrived at this picture is the story of learning to understand what we see.”

Science Mystery explored:

Is Time Travel Possible? answered by Dr. Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York, is the author of VISIONS: HOW SCIENCE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE 21ST CENTURY and the best-seller HYPERSPACE, writes:

Interestingly enough, Stephen Hawking once opposed the idea of time travel. He even claimed he had “empirical” evidence against it. If time travel existed, he said, then we would have been visited by tourists from the future. Yet we see no tourists from the future. Ergo: time travel is not possible.

Because of the enormous amount of work done by theoretical physicists within the last five years or so, Hawking has since changed his mind, and now believes that time travel is possible (although not necessarily practical). Furthermore, perhaps we are simply not very interesting to these tourists from the future. Anyone who can harness the power of a star would consider us to be very primitive.