Stephen Hawking, one of most important scientists, time, dies

Monitoring Desk

ANKARA: Stephen Hawking, one of the most important scientists of the world, passed away at the age of 76 early Wednesday.

He was born in Oxford, England, on Jan. 8, 1942.

When he was just 22-years-old, doctors told Hawking, who suffered from a rare disease that gradually paralyzed him, that he would live for only a few more years.

The “miracle man” of the science world, however, went on to live for decades and proved his mettle as one of the brightest and most renowned scientists of his time on earth.

He was best known for his theories on time, black holes and relativity.

Hawking had ALS, which left him severely paralyzed to the point that he was unable to even communicate without computer aid. He spent a huge part of his life bound to a wheelchair, but despite that he had continued his scientific studies. In 2014, Hawking’s awe-inspiring life dedicated to science was turned into a film, The Theory of Everything, which earned Eddie Redmayne an Oscar for his role in portraying the famous physicist.

– Education

Hawking’s father wanted to send him to the University of Westminster for a better education, but he could not attend scholarship exam due to his illness. Later, he joined the University of Oxford’s Physics Department.

After his graduation at the age of 20, he pursued his masters in cosmology at the University of Cambridge, which he completed in 1965 after submitting his thesis titled “Properties of Expan-ding Universes”; later, he started working as a research assistant at the university.

In 1966, Hawking was awarded the Adams Prize, one of the most prestigious awards given by the University of Cambridge, for his research “Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime”.

In 1979, Hawking became the Lucasian Professor at the University of Cambridge.

– A life bound to computer

In 1963, he was diagnosed with amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is a motor neurone disease, and was given two years to live.

But he went on to study at Cambridge and continued his studies with the help of his wife at the time. Hawking, who became dependent on a wheelchair, suffered from pneumonia during his visit to CERN (The European Organ-ization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland in 1985. His wife had turned down a proposal to take him off life support unit when he fell ill. The only remaining option, tracheotomy, then destroyed Hawking’s ability to speak.

In 1986, Walter Woltozs developed a computer program called “Equalizer” especially for Hawking. He used the program to communicate with others for the rest of his life. AA