Hawking Radiation · Singularity Theorems · 10M Copies Sold · 55 Years with ALS
January 8, 1942 – March 14, 2018 · Oxford, England
He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21 and given two years to live. He lived fifty-five more. He decoded black holes, wrote the bestselling science book in history, and became the most recognized scientist since Einstein — all while trapped in a body that could eventually only move one cheek muscle.
Six acts. Seventy-six years. A mind that explored infinity while its body contracted to nothing.
Born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. By his own admission, a lazy student — until the universe intervened.
Born in Oxford on January 8, 1942 — exactly 300 years after Galileo died. His father Frank was a research biologist; his mother Isobel was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford. The family was brilliant and eccentric — they read books at the dinner table in silence. Stephen was an unremarkable student who estimated he averaged about one hour of work per day at Oxford. He graduated with a first-class degree in physics by solving problems the examiners found challenging. He went to Cambridge for his PhD in cosmology under Dennis Sciama. In 1963, at age 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Doctors gave him two years. He fell into depression, then emerged with an urgency he'd never felt before: if he was going to die young, the work had to matter.
He proved the Big Bang began in a singularity. Then he proved black holes aren't entirely black.
Hawking's PhD thesis applied Roger Penrose's singularity theorem to the entire universe, proving that if general relativity is correct, a singularity must have existed at the beginning of time — the Big Bang was real, and it started from a point of infinite density. In 1974, he made his most famous discovery: applying quantum mechanics to black holes, he showed that they emit radiation and slowly evaporate. "Hawking radiation" stunned the physics community because it combined general relativity and quantum mechanics for the first time. It implied that black holes have a temperature, an entropy, and will eventually disappear. The information paradox it created — what happens to information that falls into a black hole? — remains unsolved. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at age 32, one of the youngest in history.
He held Newton's chair at Cambridge and wrote the bestselling science book in history — using one finger and then a computer.
In 1979, Hawking was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge — Newton's chair. He would hold it for thirty years. In 1985, he contracted pneumonia in Geneva and nearly died. The emergency tracheotomy that saved his life took his voice forever. He adopted the Intel speech synthesizer that would become the most famous artificial voice in the world. In 1988, A Brief History of Time was published. His editor told him every equation would halve sales; he kept only E=mc². The book sold 10 million copies, spent 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list, and was translated into 40 languages. The most severely disabled person most people had ever seen became the most famous scientist on Earth.
He appeared on The Simpsons, Star Trek, and Pink Floyd albums. He became the public face of human curiosity.
Hawking became something unprecedented: a theoretical physicist who was also a global celebrity. He appeared on The Simpsons (four times), Star Trek: The Next Generation (playing poker with Einstein and Newton), The Big Bang Theory, and voiced himself in numerous documentaries. He attended zero-gravity flights, visited Antarctica, and maintained a wicked sense of humor. He bet against the Higgs boson existing (he lost and paid $100). He conceded the black hole information bet to John Preskill in 2004, presenting him with a baseball encyclopedia — "information" that could be retrieved. Through it all, his body continued to fail. By the 2000s, he could only communicate by twitching a single cheek muscle to select words on a screen.
His body was almost entirely paralyzed. His mind was reaching further than ever.
In his final years, Hawking warned about AI, advocated for space colonization, supported the Breakthrough Initiatives to search for extraterrestrial life, and continued publishing on the information paradox. The Theory of Everything film in 2014 brought his life story to millions. He gave a memorable lecture at the Royal Institution in 2016 where he told the audience: "Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet." On March 14, 2018 — Einstein's birthday and Pi Day — Stephen Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge. He was 76. He had lived 55 years beyond his two-year prognosis. His ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, between Newton and Darwin.
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Historian accounts, cosmology analysis, fact checks, and scene pitches from 267 contributors.
He explored the universe from a wheelchair. You can help tell his story from anywhere.