Stephen Hawking

Hawking was born in Oxford in 1942, in the thick of the Second World War, his mother having gone to the relative safety of Oxford to give birth away from the air raids. Clever but hardly diligent as a boy, he entered Oxford at seventeen to read physics, keener on rowing and socializing, yet still took a first-class degree with ease before moving to Cambridge for cosmology. At the time he seemed a brilliant young man who had not yet found his direction.

The turning point came suddenly at twenty-one. He was diagnosed with ALS, and doctors predicted he might have only two or three years to live. The verdict nearly crushed him, yet it also unexpectedly kindled him — in what little time seemed left, he married Jane Wilde and rediscovered his zest for life and research. What followed far exceeded everyone’s grim expectations: he worked from a wheelchair for over half a century.

It was precisely as illness closed in that he reached the heights of scholarship. With Penrose he used general relativity to prove that a spacetime singularity must exist at the origin of the universe and inside black holes; in 1974 he proposed the field-shaking "Hawking radiation," showing that black holes are not entirely black but slowly radiate particles and may even evaporate. In his early thirties he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and later held the Lucasian Professorship at Cambridge — the chair once occupied by Newton and Dirac.

His body, however, kept retreating. A tracheotomy after a bout of pneumonia took away his ability to speak naturally; from then on he could only spell out words letter by letter through a computer and speak through a synthesizer, whose American-accented "mechanical voice" became his most recognizable trademark. In 1988 "A Brief History of Time" told ordinary readers about the universe, black holes, and time, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide and making this theoretical physicist a truly household name. He went on to cameo in film and television, experience zero gravity, and speak at a Paralympics opening ceremony, his influence spilling far beyond academia.

In his later years he still refused to fall silent, warning of the potential risks of artificial intelligence, joining visions of exploring alien worlds and interstellar travel, always fixing his gaze on humanity’s distant horizon. In 2018 he died peacefully in Cambridge at seventy-six, his ashes interred in Westminster Abbey beside Newton and Darwin. Hawking’s true greatness lies perhaps not only in those black-hole equations but in how, with a body held captive, he proved that as long as there is life, thought can roam the entire universe and hope need never be extinguished.