“My goal is simple.
It is the complete understanding of the
Universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
-Stephen Hawking
THE BRIEF HISTORY OF STEPHEN HAWKING
Stephen William Hawking.
1942 - 2018.
Cosmologist, space traveller
and hero
Liew Shu Yan 133482
Born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England, in the middle of World War II
In 1959, he won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied physics under Robert Berman
He graduated in 1962 with a First Class BA degree.
Left Oxford for Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied for a time under Fred Hoyle, the most
distinguished English astronomer of the time.
In 1965, he attended a lecture by Roger Penrose, on space-time singularities. He would later
collaborate with Penrose on several important papers on the study of theoretical astronomy and
cosmology.
At the age of 21, Hawking started to develop the first symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis
(ALS or “Lou Gehrig's disease”).
1.Theory Of Singularities
2.Laws Of Black Hole Mechanics
3.Cosmic Inflation Theory
4.Model On The Wave Function Of The
Universe
5.Hawking Radiation
6.Theory of Everything
Hawking-Penrose theorem:
Sir Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking proved in a theorem that
Einstein's General Relativity must break down at a certain point in
Space-time under certain generic physical conditions. This point is
called 'Singularity'. There is singularity point inside a Black Hole and
also at the moment of creation of the Universe.
Hawking Radiation
Hawking, for the first time, used Quantum Mechanics in the General
Relativistic realm and rigorously showed that Black Holes can radiate and has
temperature. This work has given rise of a lot of research activities in the field
of 'Black Hole Thermodynamics' and 'Quantum Mechanics in curved space-
time'. It could open a path towards the final unified theory of Physics called
'Quantum Gravity' or more popularly 'The Theory of Everything'.
Primordial fluctuations:
Hawking had some important
work in explaining how galaxies
and clusters of galaxies took
shape from early homogeneous
gaseous universe (that
eventually made 'life' possible in
the universe). The explanation is
based on some tiny fluctuations
or imperfections in the extremely
homogeneous early universe.
Black Hole information paradox:
Another legendary work (question actually) by
Hawking. He asked, as Black Hole swallows
everything and eventually gets evaporated through
'Hawking radiation', the 'information' about the object
it swallowed gets lost. But the most fundamental law
of Physics is: Information MUST be conserved and
Can't be lost from the universe. So it created a
paradox.
The theory of everything
The “theory of everything” is an idea in the scientific community that there is
a single, all-encompassing theory that can describe the physical world.
Although the scientific community has yet to come up with the theory,
Hawking came up with a formula that unified quantum mechanics and
classical physics. The ground-breaking aspect of this formula was
combining both classical and quantum mechanics with classical physics to
describe the motion of tiny particles that make up large bodies.
AWARDS
-In 1974 the Royal Society elected him one of its youngest fellows.
-Pope Paul VI awarded him and Roger Penrose the Pius XI Gold Medal for Science
-He also went on to receive the Albert Einstein Award and Hughes Medal from the Royal
Society
-He became professor of gravitational physics at Cambridge in 1977, and in 1979
he was appointed to Cambridge’s Lucasian professorship of mathematics, a post
once held by Isaac Newton.
-Hawking was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and a
Companion of Honour in 1989.
-He received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 2006.
-In 2008 he accepted a visiting research chair at the Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
-Hawking attained at least 12 honorary degrees. However, the Nobel Prize eluded him.
"From his wheelchair, he's led us on a journey to the farthest and
strangest reaches of the cosmos. In so doing, he has stirred our
imagination and shown us the power of the human spirit here on Earth,"
Obama said during the ceremony.
CULTURAL ICON
2012
KSC, 2007
He wrote prodigiously for both a popular
audience and the scientific community over
the course of his career, authoring or co-
authoring at least 15 books, according to his
personal website.
"The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time" (1973)
"A Brief History of Time" (1988)
"Black Holes and Baby Universes" (1993)
"The Universe in a Nutshell" (2001)
"On the Shoulders of Giants" (2002)
“The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe” (2002)
"A Briefer History of Time" (2005)
"God Created the Integers" (2005)
"The Grand Design" (2010)
"My Brief History" (2013)
"Black Holes: The Reith Lectures" (2016)
CONTRIBUTIONS
•The Origins of the Universe
•The Big Bang Theory
•Gravitational and Spacetime Singularities
•Black Hole Radiation
•A Universe Without Spacetime Boundaries
•Atheism
•The High Likelihood of the Existence of Extra-
terrestrial Life
July 2004
Hawking announces that he has solved the
Black Hole paradox, which has been a
troubling scientists for years. He presents
his most recent findings at the international
conference on general relativity and
gravitation in Dublin.
