Stephen Hawking, the amazingly gifted physicist has passed away at his home in Cambridge it was announced yesterday.
The professor, who was diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease at the age of 22 and was given only so long to live, lived with it until his death at 76.
In that time he earned a place at Oxford University to read science before going on to complete his PhD in cosmology at Cambridge before the onset of his illness spurred him to some of the greatest works in his field.
In the 1970s, Hawking coined his theory ‘Hawking radiation’ where black holes radiate energy, as well as predicting the existence of mini-black holes at the time of the Big Bang.
His theories on gravity and black holes were written up by Hawking for his best selling book released in 1988 – A Brief History of Time. It remained at the top of the publishing charts for 5 years and sales hit 10 million copies. For Hawking though, he had done what nobody had achieved and brought science and complicated text about the universe into something simple to understand to the mainstream public.
For most of his entire life he had been in a wheelchair, unable to speak, and his voice synthesiser became as famous as him, with culture highlights being ask to appear in The Simpsons.
A few years before his death, Hollywood called. Eddie Redmayne who played Hawking in the fantastic biographical film The Theory Of Everything in 2015 said he was “the funniest man he had ever met.”
Professor Brian Cox said on his twitter account “Sad to hear about Stephen Hawking. What a remarkable life. His contributions to science will be used as long as there are scientists, and there are many more scientists because of him. He spoke about the value and fragility of human life and cilvilisation and greatly enhanced both.”
Hawking leaves behind Robert, Lucy and Timothy, who he had with his first wife Jane Wilde who he divorced in 1995 and went on to marry his carer and nurse Elaine Mason the same year before divorcing her in 2006.