Hawking, 1942-2018

Hawking, 1942-2018

Context

Passing away of Stephen Hawking

Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Stephen Hawking diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an incurable motor neuron disease was given only two years to live

His Breakthroughs

Luckily, the type of ALS he had progressed slowly, and over time he made many discoveries that marked him among the great physicists of his time

• Singularity Theorem: His first breakthrough was in the work he did for his PhD thesis.Hawking came up with a singularity theorem for the universe. This work and its extensions, known as the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, brought him international acclaim
• Laws of black hole mechanics:Later, along with others he formulated the laws of black hole mechanics, which resemble the laws of thermodynamics. Thinking along these lines led him to a contradiction — that this theory predicted that black holes would exude radiation, whereas in a purely classical picture nothing could escape the black hole, not even light. He resolved this contradiction by invoking quantum mechanics. The radiation of the black hole was named Hawking radiation

A Brief history of Time

He came to be known to millions with the publication of A Brief History of Time, his best-selling book describing in non-technical terms the structure, development and fate of the universe

Impact

• He ranks with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as that rare physicist who fired the popular imagination. However, unlike  Newton and Einstein, Hawking was focussed on cosmology and gravitation
• His was a life that carried to the public not only the secrets of the cosmos but also the promise of hope and human endeavor; he showed that disability need not hold a person back in the pursuit of his dreams. He leaves behind a wealth of knowledge, and also the conviction that the will to survive can overcome all odds