The life of the wonderful Mr. Hawking

Despite his death, Stephen Hawking managed to enter the circle of the immortals with the great legacy he leaves to the later scholars of the universe and its mysteries.

His unique mind helped him overcome the limitations imposed on him by his illness and his incredible longing for life made him live it to the core.

What his colleagues, his family and his students adored about him was his humor and spontaneity, elements that made him stand out wherever he was.

At the age of 21, as he himself had said, all his expectations were reduced to 0, as he was diagnosed with the degenerative disease of the motor neuron which resulted in him being confined to a wheelchair, without being able to speak and communicate with people. only via computer.

And maybe despair knocked on his door, but it did not make him put it down and surrender to his fate, but to fight to shape it, as he had dreamed.

From the mid-60s, the then young astrophysicist strongly resisted the possibility of sitting in a wheelchair.

But when he had to, he used to take crazy walks through the streets of Cambridge Campus and was the first at student parties.

His work

In the early 70s he co-authored a paper on gravitational uniqueness theorems with physicist Roger Penrose in the context of the general relativity of the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, now called Hawking radiation. continue until they run out of energy and evaporate.

At the age of just 32, Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and five years later began teaching mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

His personal life

In 1965, two years after his diagnosis, Stephen Hawking married his student lover, Jane Wilde, with whom he had three children.

In her autobiography, which later became a film, she revealed that what fascinated her about him was his eccentric appearance and his richly tangled hair.

In 1985, during a visit to the Cern Nuclear Research Center in Switzerland, Hawking contracted a life-threatening lung infection.

Doctors then asked Jane if she wanted to end the mechanical support and end her husband's life. She refused, causing Hawking to undergo a tracheotomy, which saved his life, but deprived him of what was left of his speech.

His health deteriorated and in 1991 he divorced his wife. It now needed 24-hour nursing care and for this reason three nurses were hired. One of them is Elaine Mason who became his second wife, four years after his divorce.

Hawking was awarded numerous prizes, including the Albert Einstein Medal (1979), the Wolf Physics Prize (1988), the Copley Medal (2006) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009).

But Hawking also had intense social action, and his theories about God were much debated.

"I consider the brain to be a computer that will stop working when its parts break down. There is no paradise or afterlife for damaged computers. "This is a fairy tale for people who are afraid of the dark."

Source: Star.gr