Stephen hawking?

Question

My partner and i had a discussion about him last night after seeing an advert! We are unaware of his background etc and it really interests me.i am aware he is highly intelligent,but how did he become famous,what exactly is he famous for and was he born the way he is or did he have an accident or something! Thanks in advance.x

Answer 1

He's a famous professor, writer and theoretical astrophysicist. He's in a wheelchair because he has ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease).

Answer 2

He's a brilliant British physicist and his most famous work that I'm aware of is on black holes and the "Hawking Radiation" that comes out of them (I think). He was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease early in life but in spite of this steadily worsening condition he continues to lead an active academic life from his wheelchair. He speaks through a computer voice synthesizer. Undoubtedly his disability is the basis of most of his celebrity. There are other great physicists who've worked with him such as Roger Penrose who are less famous but equally as brilliant. Nevertheless that isn't Hawking's fault and his life example is tremendous.

Answer 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Haw...

Answer 4

he is one of my contacts!

Answer 5

Stephen Hawking

Born January 8, 1942 (1942-01-08)

Oxford, England

Residence England

Nationality British

Fields Applied mathematician

Theoretical physicist

Institutions University of Cambridge

Alma mater University of Oxford

University of Cambridge

Doctoral advisor Dennis Sciama

Doctoral students Bruce Allen

Fay Dowker

Malcolm Perry

Bernard Carr

Gary Gibbons

Known for Black holes

Theoretical cosmology

Quantum gravity

Influences Dikran Tahta

Notable awards Prince of Asturias Award (1989)

Copley Medal (2006)

Signature



Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the runaway popular science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.[1]

His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation, or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation.[2] His scientific career spans more than 40 years and his books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and world-renowned theoretical physicist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.[3] Hawking is disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). The illness has progressed over the years and he is now almost completely paralysed.

Contents [hide]

1 Biography

2 Research fields

3 Losing an old bet

4 Illness

5 Computer

6 Acclaim

6.1 Statues

7 Distinctions

8 Selected publications

8.1 Technical

8.2 Popular

8.3 Films and series

9 Awards and honours

10 Media appearances

11 See also

12 References

13 Further reading

14 External links



Biography

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 to Frank Hawking, a research biologist, and Isobel Hawking. He had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward.[4] Though Hawking’s parents had their home in North London, they moved to Oxford while Isobel was pregnant with Stephen, desiring a safer location for the birth of their first child (London was under attack at the time by the Luftwaffe).[5] After Hawking was born, the family moved back to London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research.[4]

In 1950, Hawking and his family moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire where he attended St Albans High School for Girls between 1950 to 1953. Unlike today, boys were educated at that time at the Girls school until the age of 10.[6] From the age of 11, he attended St Albans School, where he was a good, but not an exceptional, student.[4] When asked later to name a teacher who had inspired him, Hawking named his Mathematics teacher, "Mr Tahta".[7] He maintains his connection with the school, giving his name to one of the four houses and to an extracurricular science lecture series. He has visited to deliver one of the lectures and has also granted a lengthy interview to pupils working on the school magazine, the Albanian.

He was always interested in science.[4] He enrolled at University College, Oxford with the intent of studying mathematics, although his father preferred he go into medicine. Since mathematics was not offered at University College, Hawking instead chose physics. His interests during this time were in thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said in the New York Times Magazine, "It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it. ... He didn’t have very many books, and he didn’t take notes. Of course, his mind was completely different from all of his contemporaries."[4] He was passing with his fellow students, but his unimpressive study habits gave him a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honours, making an "oral examination" necessary. Berman said of the oral examination, "And of course the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves."[4]

After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford University in 1962, he stayed to study astronomy. He decided to leave when he found that studying sunspots, which was all the observatory was equipped for, did not appeal to him and that he was more interested in theory than in observation.[4] He left Oxford for Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he engaged in the study of theoretical astronomy and cosmology.

Almost as soon as he arrived at Cambridge, he started developing symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (colloquially known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), a type of motor neuron disease which would cost him the loss of almost all neuromuscular control. During his first two years at Cambridge, he did not distinguish himself, but, after the disease had stabilized and with the help of his doctoral tutor, Dennis William Sciama, he returned to working on his Ph.D.[4] Stephen revealed that he did not see much point in obtaining a doctorate if he was to die soon. Hawking later said that the real turning point was his 1965 marriage to Jane Wilde, a language student.[4] After gaining his Ph.D. Stephen became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.

Hawking was elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982, and became a Companion of Honour in 1989. Hawking is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Jane Hawking, née Wilde, Hawking’s first wife, with whom he had three children, cared for him until 1991 when the couple separated, reportedly due to the pressures of fame and his increasing disability. Hawking married his nurse, Elaine Mason (who was also the previous wife of David Mason, designer of the first version of Hawking’s talking computer), in 1995. In October 2006, Hawking filed for divorce.[8]

In 1999, Jane Hawking published a memoir, Music to Move the Stars, detailing her own long-term relationship with a family friend whom she later married. Hawking’s daughter Lucy Hawking is a novelist. Their son Robert Hawking emigrated to the United States, married, and has one child, George Edward Hawking. Reportedly, Hawking and his first family were reconciled in 2007.[9]

At the celebration of his 65th birthday on January 8, 2007, Hawking announced his plans for a zero-gravity flight in 2007 to prepare for a sub-orbital spaceflight in 2009 on Virgin Galactic’s space service. Billionaire Richard Branson pledged to pay all expenses for the flight, costing an estimated £100,000.[10] Stephen Hawking’s zero-gravity flight in a "Vomit Comet" of Zero Gravity Corporation, during which he experienced weightlessness eight times, took place on April 26, 2007.[11]

He became the first quadriplegic to float free in a weightless state. This was the first time in 40 years that he moved freely beyond the confines of his wheelchair. The fee is normally US$3,750 for 10-15 plunges, but Hawking was not required to pay the fee. A bit of a futurist,[12] Hawking was quoted before the flight saying:

"Many people have asked me why I am taking this flight. I am doing it for many reasons. First of all, I believe that life on Earth is at an ever increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster such as sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if it doesn’t go into space. I therefore want to encourage public interest in space."[13]

Research fields

Hawking’s principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.[14] This led, in 1970, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.[15]

He supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler’s “No-Hair Theorem” – namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.

Hawking also suggested that, upon analysis of gamma ray emissions, after the Big Bang, primordial or mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.[16]

In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the Universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North pole: one cannot travel North of the North pole, there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed Universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-