English 1301Feb.
20th, 2004STEPHEN HAWKING. Mr. Stephen Hawking wrote: “For thousand of years, people have wonderedabout the universe. Did it stretch out forever or was there a limit? Andwhere did it all come from? Did the universe have a beginning, a moment ofcreation? Or had the universe existed forever?.
. . All my life, I have beenfascinated by the big questions that face us, and have tried to findscientific answers to them. . . Personally, I’m sure that the universe beganwith a hot Big Bang.
. . The expansion of the universe spreads everything out,but gravity tries to pull it all back together again. . . “In the full name is Stephen William Hawking, born Jan.
8, 1942, Oxford,Oxfordshire, England, and grew up in London. He attended St. Albans Schooland entered Oxford University in 1959. He studied mathematics and physicsat the University. Upon graduating (B. A.
degree) in 1962, he moved toCambridge University to study theoretical astronomy and cosmology. It wasat this time he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (an incurabledegenerative neuromuscular disease), named for the American baseball playerwho died from it in 1941. As the disease worsened, Hawking was confined toa motorized wheelchair. In time, he was unable to write and barely able tospeak. However, he proceeded to work on his doctorate and in 1965 married afellow student, Jane Wilde.
The marriage lasted until 1990. After receivinghis doctorate in 1966, he remained at Cambridge as a member of thedepartment of applied mathematics. He was appointed professor ofgravitational physics in 1977 and Lucasian professor of mathematics (achair previously held by Mr. Isaac Newton) in April 1980. Hawking worked primarily in the field of general relativity andparticularly on the physics of black holes. In the late 1960s, he provedthat if general relativity is true and the universe is expanded, asingularity must have occurred at the birth of the universe.
In 1971 hesuggested the formation, following the big bang, of numerous objectscontaining as much as 1,000,000,000 tons of mass but occupying only thespace of a proton. These objects, called mini black holes, are unique inthat their immense mass and gravity require that they be ruled by the lawsof relativity, while their minute size requires that the laws of quantummechanics apply to them also. In 1974 Hawking proposed that, in accordancewith the predictions of quantum theory, black holes emit subatomicparticles until they exhaust their energy and finally explode. Hawking’sworking spurred efforts to theoretically delineate the properties of blackholes, objects about which it was previously thought that nothing could beknown.
His work showed these properties relationship to the laws ofclassical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics. His publications include THE LARGE SCALE STRUCTURE OF SPACE-TIME (1973;coauthored with G. F. R. Ellis), SUPERSPACE AND SUPERGRAVITY (1981), THE VERYEARLY UNIVERSE (1983).
Hawking is one of the most admired and brilliant theoretical physicists ofthe 20th century, he became a widely known celebrity as well after his bookA BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME: from the Big Bang to black Holes unexpectedlybecame a bestseller in 1988 (a motion picture based on the book followed). The book spent more than four years on the London Sunday Times bestsellerlist- the longest run for any book in history. He followed it with a seriesof essays, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, in1993 and withThe Universe in a Nutshell in 2001.
