How did the universe begin? Why is the universe
the way it is? How will it end?
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Stephen Hawking was a British theoretical physicist who devoted much of his life to probing the space-time described by general relativity, and the singularities where it breaks down. In simpler terms, he studied the universe and black holes.
He did most of this work while
confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak without the assistance of a computer. He had the
progressive neurological disease amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis, or 'Lou Gehrig’s Disease', and was unable to move around or talk.
Despite this affliction, Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by
Isaac Newton. He continued to study the cosmology of the universe until his death in 2018, and has written several highly successful books.
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Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein’s famous
General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.
These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great scientific
development of the first half of the 20th Century.
One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black
holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear!
Perhaps his most impressive feat was the writing
the international bestseller 'A BRIEF HISTORY
OF TIME'. The book spent more than four years
on the London Sunday Times bestseller list—the
longest run for any book in history, let alone a book about astrophysical theories.
Stephen Hawking writes:
"All my life, I have been fascinated by the big questions that face us, and have
tried to find scientific answers to them. If, like me, you have looked at the
stars, and tried to make sense of what you see, you too have started to
wonder what makes the universe exist. The questions are clear, and
deceptively simple. But the answers have always seemed well beyond our
reach. Until now.
"The ideas which had grown over two thousand years of observation have had
to be radically revised. In less than a hundred years, we have found a new
way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now
find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of
stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. And our galaxy itself is just one of billions
of galaxies, in a universe that is infinite and expanding. But this is far from the
end of a long history of inquiry. Huge questions remain to be answered,
before we can hope to have a complete picture of the universe we live in.
"Discoveries, past and present, have revolutionized the way we think. From the Big Bang to black
holes, from dark matter to a possible Big Crunch, our image of the universe
today is full of strange sounding ideas, and remarkable truths. The story of
how we arrived at this picture is the story of learning to understand what we
see."
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