Stephen Hawking
Brief
Biography
Professor
Stephen William Hawking was born on 8th January 1942 (exactly 300 years after
the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north
London but during the second world war Oxford was considered a safer place to
have babies. When he was eight his family moved to St. Albans, a town about 20
miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St. Albans School
and then on to University College, Oxford (1952); his father's old college.
Stephen wanted to study mathematics although his father would have preferred
medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he pursued
physics instead. After three years and not very much work, he was awarded a
first class honours degree in natural science.
In
October 1962, Stephen arrived at the Department of Applied Mathematics and
Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at the University of Cambridge to do research in
cosmology, there being no-one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His
supervisor was Dennis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was
working in Cambridge. After gaining his PhD (1965) with his thesis titled
'Properties of Expanding Universes', he became, first, a research fellow (1965)
then Fellow for Distinction in Science (1969) at Gonville & Caius college.
In 1966 he won the Adams Prize for his essay 'Singularities and the Geometry of
Space-time'. Stephen moved to the Institute of Astronomy (1968), later moving
back to DAMTP (1973), employed as a research assistant, and published his first
academic book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, with George Ellis.
During the next few years, Stephen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society
(1974) and Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute
of Technology (1974). He became a Reader in Gravitational Physics at DAMTP
(1975), progressing to Professor of Gravitational Physics (1977). He then held
the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics (1979-2009). The chair was
founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas who had
been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac
Barrow and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton.
Stephen is currently the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director
of Research at DAMTP.
Professor
Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With
Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's general theory of relativity implied
space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes
(1970). These results indicated that 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 rather
should emit 'Hawking' radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear (1974).
Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary
time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined
by the laws of science. Recently Stephen has been working with colleagues on a
possible resolution to the black hole information paradox, where debate centres
around the conservation of information.
His
many publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R
Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300
Years of Gravitation, with W Israel. Among the popular books Stephen Hawking
has published are his best seller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby
Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design and My
Brief History.
Professor
Stephen Hawking has thirteen honorary degrees. He was awarded CBE (1982),
Companion of Honour (1989) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). He is
the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, most notably the Fundamental
Physics prize (2013), Copley Medal (2006) and the Wolf Foundation prize (1988).
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences
and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.
In
1963 Stephen was diagnosed with ALS, a form of Motor Neurone Disease, shortly
after his 21st birthday. In spite of being wheelchair-bound and dependent on a
computerised voice system for communication Stephen continues to combine family
life (he has three children and three grandchildren) with his research into
theoretical physics, in addition to an extensive programme of travel and public
lectures. He still hopes to make it into space one day.
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