By Matteo Liguori, Year 11
Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England, his family being forced to move there to escape the WWII bombing of London.
Ever since childhood, he showed incredible intelligence and an unorthodox method to studying and learning, which enabled him to excel and got him a place into oxford where he went on to study Physics, showing an interest in Cosmology. At Oxford, he immediately stood out for his strange methods of studying and incredible apparent ease in the subject. His tutor, Robert Berman, later described him as an extraordinary student.
After graduating in Physics, he went on to study Astronomy but quickly changed his mind and went to Trinity College, Cambridge where he studied Theoretical Astronomy and Cosmology. It was here that the first signs of his neurofunctional disorder (ALS) started to appear. The disease quickly reduced him to a wheelchair and made it impossible for him to speak or feed himself. At one point his prognosis was three years. Luckily, his disease slowed down, allowing Stephen Hawking to devote his life to one goal: “a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
Through his incredible career, Stephen Hawking’s contributions to science, probably only second to those of Albert Einstein’s, included progress in the reconciliation of classical physics and quantum mechanics, a study of black holes, the theoretical radiation named Hawking Radiation, the study of quantum gravity, developing a mathematical model for Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and a deeper insight into the origin of the Big Bang.
Despite being one of the best scientists of our time, tackling some of the hardest questions mankind has ever asked, he also dedicated his life to explaining the incredible answers to the public in his to books and runaway bestsellers A Brief History of Time and The Universe in A Nutshell.
Stephen Hawking passed away on 14 March 2018 at his home in Cambridge, England, leaving the world to mourn the loss of the best physicist of this century.
Rest among the stars.
