Stephen Hawking

How did the universe begin? Why is the universe the way it is? How will it end?

Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist who has 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 studies the universe and Black Holes. He’s done most of this work while confined to a wheelchair. He has the progressive neurological disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or 'Lou Gehrig’s Disease', and no longer can move around or talk; he communicates through his computer. Despite this affliction, Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton. He continues to study the cosmology of the universe, and has written several highly successful books.

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! 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.     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."