The life of Professor Steven Hawking

The world has lost a giant. Prof Stephen Hawking, the Galaxy’s best-known scientist and most unlikely cultural icon, died on Wednesday 14 March at his home in Cambridge. I’ve spent the days since speaking to those who knew him and one clear theme emerges. Hawking was a stubborn man. Of course, he was funny and smart, that was clear for the world to see. But perhaps, to those of us watching from afar, his radiance hid the vital ingredient to his genius: true grit. Hawking was determined to never let his condition slow him down. Sometimes literally: Hawking broke his leg on his 60th birthday after driving too fast off a kerb. He travelled the world, and even had a taste of zero-gravity. It was this same resolve that would…

HAYLEY BENNETT Science writer Hayley explores the pathology of motor neurone disease and outlines the challenges posed by diagnosing and treating it. PETER J BENTLEY A Professor of computer science at University College London, Peter delves into the technology that enabled Hawking to keep talking. MARCUS CHOWN Marcus, an author and former radio astronomer, guides you through the theories and writings that characterised Hawking’s life. BRIAN CLEGG Award-winning science author Brian delves into optimism and pessimism inherent in Hawking’s outlook for the future of humanity. CHARLOTTE SLEIGH Prof Charlotte Sleigh examines how the achievements of Britain’s greatest scientific minds’ stack up against Hawking’s accomplishments.…

Stephen Hawking was one of the most imaginative and influential physicists of his generation – yet he never won the Nobel Prize. He wrote a popular science book that became a publishing sensation – but which is arguably the least-read bestseller of all time. He was cruelly confined to a wheelchair by a disease that progressively paralysed him – yet his mind ranged freely across the immensities of the cosmos. These are just some of the paradoxes of what, by any standards, was an extraordinary life. Hawking was born in Luftwaffe-ravaged London on 8 January 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo (a fact that greatly appealed to him). Though his father wanted him to be a doctor, he was inspired by a schoolteacher to study physics at…

The 2014 film The Theory of Everything, which starred Eddie Redmayne as Hawking (pictured right), was a huge commercial and critical success, picking up five Oscar and 10 BAFTA nominations, and winning one and three of them respectively. The film was based on Jane Hawking’s 2007 memoir Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen, which was itself an updated edition of her 1999 book Music to Move the Stars. The later was written while the couple were estranged, and Jane rewrote it once they became reconciled (after Hawking’s second marriage broke down). But the film wasn’t the first to depict Hawking’s life in film: that honour goes to the 1991 Steven Spielberg-produced film version of A Brief History of Time, which was really much less about the book than it…

It was 1988. Ex-soap star Kylie Minogue topped the charts with I Should be so Lucky. In the North Sea, 167 people died in the inferno that destroyed the Piper Alpha oil rig and, above Lockerbie in Scotland, a bomb detonated on board Pan Am Flight 103. The late-September launch of mission STS-26 aboard the space shuttle Discovery was the first lift-off for NASA’s vehicle since Challenger disintegrated 71 seconds into its flight in 1986. But the most significant event in the world of science was, arguably, not a scientific discovery but the publication of a book: A Brief History of Time. It all began in 1982 when Stephen Hawking, famous for his work on the theory of black holes and for being cruelly confined to a wheelchair by motor…

Stephen Hawking was a pioneer in theoretical physics and cosmology. His scientific advances had given him fame, and he was not afraid to express his opinions widely in all forms of media. Yet despite having such powerful words, for nearly half his life his distinctive voice was generated by a computer. Hawking was a promising young physicist, but in 1963, at the age of 21, he was diagnosed with a rare, early onset and slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease. The disease causes the death of neurons that control muscles in the body. Hawking decided to use this diagnosis as motivation to achieve his PhD and make significant advances in the understanding of the early Universe, but his body and voice soon became barely controllable. He relied on family members,…