Stephen
Hawking
In the early morning of March 14, 2018,
exactly 139 years after Albert Einstein’s birth, the renowned physicist Stephen
Hawking passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. That he lived to such
an age, and that he accomplished so much in his time, is a remarkable
achievement.
In 1963, Hawking,
while a graduate student at Oxford, was diagnosed with a rare early-onset
slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease,
which eventually robbed him of all motor functions, including the ability to
use his voice. The following year, he became engaged to Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister. Hawking later said that the
engagement gave him "something to live for,” since the doctors’ predictions
of a very short and unproductive life induced a deep depression. The two married
on the 14th July 1965, determined to face all obstacles in their way.
Hawking is
most famous for his work regarding black holes, celestial objects so massive
that nothing, not even light, can escape their clutches. Based on Einstein’s theory
of General Relativity, Hawking, along with Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Roger
Penrose and others, advanced our knowledge of the behavior of the Universe.
Their work suggested that, upon
the collapse of a massive star, when it runs out of its own internal nuclear
fuel, it undergoes a sudden shrinkage under the pull of its own gravity.
They predicted that the outcome of this collapse, as implied by Einstein’s
theory of gravity, to be a space-time
singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter,
ordinarily not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical
world. A massive star, millions of miles across, would collapse to the size of
the dot in the letter ‘i.’
Einstein himself strongly opposed such an idea
and conclusion, and for a long time, not much progress occurred in this field. It took the genius of Stephen Hawking, among others,
to find that Einstein was in error, and that star collapse and singularity
do happen. Thus, in the later 1960s and early
1970s, the study of quantum theory and gravity was revived.
Hawking was a regular visitor to
Canada. The physicist permitted The Stephen Hawking Centre in Waterloo,
Ontario, to bear his name.
“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make
sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking
said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem,
there is always something you can do and succeed at.”
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