Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was born in Oxford, England, on the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death — a coincidence he enjoyed citing. The eldest child of a research biologist and a medical research secretary, he grew up in a household where intellectual ambition was expected and eccentricity was tolerated. He studied physics at University College, Oxford, then moved to Cambridge for graduate work in cosmology. It was there, in 1963 at the age of twenty-one, that he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and given two years to live. He outlived that prognosis by fifty-five years.
Rather than destroying his intellectual life, the diagnosis seems to have focused it. His doctoral thesis, completed in 1965, helped establish the mathematical foundations of what would become the Big Bang theory. Working with Roger Penrose, he proved the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, demonstrating that under general conditions, general relativity predicts spacetime singularities — places where the known laws of physics break down. In 1974 he made the discovery that would carry his name into textbooks permanently: Hawking radiation, the theoretical prediction that black holes are not entirely black but emit thermal radiation as a quantum effect, slowly evaporating over astronomical timescales. It was a result that connected quantum mechanics and general relativity in a profound and unexpected way.
As his physical condition deteriorated and his voice was lost, Hawking communicated first through residual muscle movement and then, after 1985, through a computerized speech synthesizer that became his signature voice. The disability that constrained his body seemed to liberate his ambition: if he could not write equations on a blackboard, he would do the mathematics in his head, developing a visual and geometric intuition for spacetime that his collaborators found extraordinary. His Cambridge office became one of the most visited in world science.
A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, and its companion The Universe in a Nutshell (2001) represent Hawking’s achievement as a communicator. Both books attempt to convey the ideas of modern cosmology — the Big Bang, black holes, the nature of time, the possibility of a unified theory of physics — to a general audience without dumbing them down. A Brief History of Time spent 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list and sold more than fifteen million copies; it has become a cultural landmark as much as a science book, its title a shorthand for popular physics. The books reviewed on WritersReview.com represent Hawking at his most accessible and most ambitious simultaneously.
Hawking held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009 — the same chair once held by Isaac Newton. He died in Cambridge in 2018 at the age of seventy-six, having outlived his prognosis by more than five decades and having done more than anyone else of his generation to make the deepest questions of cosmology part of the general conversation about who we are and where we came from.
