Stephen Hawking, one the brightest stars in the field of science has passed at 76, according to a statement released by his family today morning. The decease occurred at his home in Cambridge.
A pioneer of scientific exploration, a professor at Cambridge University, and a well-loved genius has died. Stephen Hawking passed yesterday, leaving behind an imprint on the scientific community that can only be compared to those of Galileo Galilei, Issac Newton and Albert Einstein. Coincidentally, Hawking shared a birthday with Galileo and passed on Einstein’s.
Besides an excellent scientist he was also a fantastic man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. Hawking was the best-known scientist in the world. He was a theoretical physicist whose early work on black holes modified how scientists believe about the nature of the world. Hawking was also a mathematician, cosmologist, astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author of various books. He wrote the landmark “A Brief History of Time,” which has sold more than 10 million copies.
When Hawking was a college student at Cambridge in 1963, he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gerig’s disease. He surpassed his two-year life expectancy by over 55 years.
Hawking who was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942 was married twice. First, he married with Jane Wilde, when he was only a graduate student and remained together for 30 years. In 1995 he divorced her first wife and married to the Elaine Mason, which was his former nurse. He had 12 privileged degrees and was awarded the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1982. Although he was a British Citizen, but still he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by American President Barack Obama.
A self-proclaimed atheist, Hawkings was critical of Israel and supported BDS, but also visited Israel a number of times and based his revolutionary theory on the works of an Mexican-Israeli scientist Jakob Bekenstein, who died in 2015. Bekenstein, who was a professor at both Ben-Gurion University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem before moving back to the United States, is considered to be the man who taught Hawking a thing or two about black holes. Hawking was initially one of Bekenstein’s detractors, but he eventually embraced the Israeli scientist’s groundbreaking ideas, which served as the basis for his own revolutionary theory that black holes give off radiation.
