Stephen Hawking
Created | Updated May 12, 2004
This is a trial entry for the Collaborator account. If you know anything about the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, UK; if you saw a recent documentary about him and remember some interesting facts; if you have read a book by or about him; or if you feel like researching this highly respected scientist, then please contribute to this entry! Suggested headings are listed below.
Perhaps somebody could compose a timeline for his biography??
His Life
A description of his life from birth to present day.
Stephen Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford (his parents lived in London, but Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies during the Second World War). When he was eight years old his family moved to St Albans. He studied physics at University College, Oxford (he would have preferred to do mathematics but it was not available) and was awarded a first-class honours degree without very much work. In one of his books he estimates that he only worked one hour a day during the three years of his undergraduate course. He moved to Cambridge for his PhD, and is now the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics there.
During his third year at Oxford, he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and told he had only two years to live. He became very depressed about this and did not do much work on his thesis for a while, until he got engaged to his first wife Jane, and realised that before they could get married he would need a job, and in order to get a job he would need to finish his Ph.D. Although his condition has progressed more slowly than is typical for MND sufferers, he is confined to a wheelchair and speaks via a speech synthesiser program running on his portable computer.
He is well known in popular culture as a disabled genius, and has appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation and occasionally been featured on The Simpsons.
On 11 January 2002, a televised symposium was held at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge to celebrate his 60th birthday. Several cosmologists including Hawking himself gave lectures. On 13 April 2004, BBC Two broadcast a documentary telling the story of his early years at university when he was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease.
His Work
A description of the theories he has proposed and/or worked on, as well as links to entries that may already have been written concerning them.
Hawking is known for proving that "black holes have no hair" - the only measurable properties of a black hole are its mass, its angular momentum and its electric charge, so information is lost when matter falls into a black hole. He also discovered that black holes are not completely black - they emit a radiation known as Hawking radiation and can eventually evaporate completely as a result.
Further Reading
This section is fairly self-explanatory.
More information about Stephen Hawking can be found at his personal website.
He has written several popular books on cosmology including A Brief History Of Time, Black Holes And Baby Universes And Other Essays and The Universe In A Nutshell.
In the introduction to A Brief History Of Time, he mentions that someone told him that each equation he included would halve the sales. He thus decided not to put in any equations, but then he changed his mind and quoted the equation E = mc2 several times in the final chapter.
