Stephen Hawking

By Lin Yue

He was given two years to live at twenty-one, and spent the next fifty-five mapping the edges of the universe from a wheelchair. Stephen Hawking was born in 1942 in Oxford, England, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo — a coincidence he loved. At Cambridge, as a graduate student, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS); doctors told him he had perhaps two years. He refused the verdict. As his body froze, his mind raced to the largest questions: with Roger Penrose, he proved the singularity theorems — that Einstein's equations demand that time itself began at the Big Bang and ends inside black holes. Then, in 1974, his supreme discovery: applying quantum theory at the event horizon, he showed that black holes are not truly black — they leak radiation, now called Hawking radiation, and slowly evaporate. A black hole, the universe's ultimate prison, could die. It was the first great result of quantum gravity, and it created the black hole information paradox that still torments physics. Confined to a wheelchair and speaking through a voice synthesizer, he held Cambridge's Lucasian chair — Newton's old chair — and wrote 'A Brief History of Time' (1988), which sold over 25 million copies and made cosmology a public conversation. He bet, joked, appeared on Star Trek and The Simpsons, and became the most recognizable scientist on earth. He died in 2018, aged seventy-six, having outlived his prognosis by half a century. His ashes rest in Westminster Abbey, between Newton and Darwin — the company he always knew he kept. His final paper, published posthumously, proposed a method for finding evidence of other universes in the microwave sky — still theorizing at the edge on his way out. He asked to have the equation for black-hole entropy engraved on his memorial stone. The universe, he insisted to the end, is not only stranger than we imagine but comprehensible.

Impact on civilization

Hawking radiation united quantum mechanics, gravity, and thermodynamics at the black hole's edge — the first foothold of quantum gravity and the deepest clue yet to a theory of everything. His singularity theorems made the Big Bang's beginning mathematically rigorous. And 'A Brief History of Time' did what no book had done: it put the universe's deepest questions into millions of ordinary hands. He also redefined what a scientist can be: a global icon of the life of the mind, proving that a body can fail completely while thought ranges across eternity.