Stephen William Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8th, 1942 in Oxford, England. So he was born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo Galilei. His parents house was in north-London, but during the second world war, Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. At the age of eight, his family moved to St Albans, which is a town about 20 miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St Albans School, and then on to University College, that famous school Oxford, his fatherīs old college. Stephen really wanted to do Mathematics, but mathematics was not available at University College, so he did Physics instead. After only three years, and not very much work, he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.

Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no-one working in that area in Oxford at the time. He had hoped to get Fred Hoyle as a supervisor who was working in Cambridge, but got Denis Sciama instead. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After he left the Institute of Astronomy in the year 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and since 1979, Stephen has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair was founded in the year, 1663, with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas, who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow, and then in 1663 by no one else than Sir Isaac Newton.

Stephen William Hawking has devoted much of his life to probing the space-time described by general relativity and the singularities where Einstein's laws break down and the space-time, virtually everything. He has done most of this work while confined in a wheelchair, brought on by the progressive neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gherigīs Disease, on a much more comprehensible language. The brain can be very active although you arenīt able to move. Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life, he has wife, three children, and one grandchild.

Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that if Einsteinīs General Theory of Relativity is true and the universe is expanding, a singularity must have occurred at the birth of the universe, The Big Bang. They implied space and time would have 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 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. In the year 1974, he first recognised a truly remarkable property of black holes, objects from which nothing was able to escape. By taking into account quantum mechanics, he was able to show that black holes can radiate energy as particles are created in their vicinity.

Stephen Hawking in an upcoming Simpson episode. Click to see bigger version