Stephen Hawking Is No More, Dies Peacefully At 76: It’s really very sad to know that British physicist and researcher Stephen Hawking died on Wednesday at the age of 76. Stephen Hawking died at his residence in Cambridge, UK. Famous physicist, Stephen Hawking was known for his singularity theorems and his work with black holes.
He was also known for a book A Brief History of Time which was released way back in 1988 and it was sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England.
At the age of 22, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis which is a progressive degenerative disease that paralyzes the muscles of the body and has no cure. Normally, death occurs up to 3 years after diagnosis due to loss of respiratory capacity.
However, Stephen Hawking continued to contribute science for decades in his wheelchair with the help of an Artificial respirator and computer which works as a voice synthesizer.
Among Hawking’s contributions are singularity theorems (in collaboration with the mathematician Roger Penrose), which attempted to respond when gravity produced singularity (a space-time point in which mass would be infinite, volume would be zero, and time would stop ); and perhaps the most important (and controversial) of all, the idea that black holes emit thermal radiation, losing energy, and therefore disappearing from the universe.
At the end of his life, Hawking generated some controversy in the scientific environment. In 2004, he announced that he has solved the information paradox, an idea that information about particles falling into black holes is eventually destroyed forever.
However, he never demonstrated his hypothesis by means of calculations. And in 2014, he even stated that black holes may not exist, also without a mathematical background.
There is a coincidence too which we would like to share, Hawking was born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo (January 8, 1642) and dies the same day as Einstein’s birth (March 14, 1879).
Rest in peace, Stephen Hawking.