Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking was a British theoretical physicist known for his groundbreaking work on black holes and cosmology, and for his bestselling book A Brief History of Time.
Doctors gave him only a few years to live in his early twenties; he went on to spend more than five decades reshaping how scientists think about black holes and the origins of the universe.
A Devastating Diagnosis
Hawking was diagnosed with a rare, early-onset form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at just 21 years old, while a graduate student at Cambridge, and doctors initially gave him only a few years to live. Remarkably, he continued groundbreaking scientific work for more than 50 additional years, gradually losing the ability to move and eventually to speak.
Hawking Radiation
His most significant scientific contribution came in 1974, when he theorized that black holes are not entirely black but emit a faint form of radiation, now known as Hawking radiation, and can eventually evaporate over immense timescales — a discovery that elegantly bridged quantum mechanics and Einstein's general relativity.
Communicating Through Technology
As his disease progressed, Hawking lost his natural speaking voice in 1985 following an emergency tracheotomy, and relied for the rest of his life on a computer-assisted voice synthesizer controlled first by a hand switch and later by movements of his cheek muscle, becoming instantly recognizable worldwide.
A Bestselling Communicator of Science
His 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, made complex cosmological concepts — including the Big Bang, black holes, and the nature of time itself — accessible to general readers, selling over 10 million copies and remaining on bestseller lists for years.
Legacy
Hawking held the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, once held by Isaac Newton, for three decades. He died in 2018 at age 76, remembered as one of the most publicly recognized and inspiring scientists of his generation.
