{"id":2139,"date":"2018-03-14T12:50:56","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T16:50:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/easy-admin.ca\/?p=2139"},"modified":"2024-03-28T07:54:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T11:54:31","slug":"stephen-hawking-dies-at-76-his-mind-roamed-the-cosmos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/easy-admin.ca\/index.php\/2018\/03\/14\/stephen-hawking-dies-at-76-his-mind-roamed-the-cosmos\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Hawking Dies at 76"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen W. Hawking<\/strong>, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.<\/p>\n

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,\u201d Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview.<\/p>\n

Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book \u201cA Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,\u201d published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, \u201cThe Theory of Everything,\u201d was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.<\/p>\n

Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.<\/p>\n

What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig\u2019s disease. He was given only a few years to live.
\nThe disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.<\/p>\n

He went on to become his generation\u2019s leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.<\/p>\n

That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Dr. Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Dr. Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes \u2014 those mythological avatars of cosmic doom \u2014 were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.<\/p>\n

Nobody, including Dr. Hawking, believed it at first \u2014 that particles could be coming out of a black hole. \u201cI wasn\u2019t looking for them at all,\u201d he recalled in an interview in 1978. \u201cI merely tripped over them. I was rather annoyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title \u201cBlack Hole Explosions?,\u201d is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature \u2014 to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.<\/p>\n

The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators \u2014 or at least to recyclers \u2014 and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,\u201d Dr. Hawking said in an interview in 1978. \u201cI certainly don\u2019t think he will survive it.<\/p>\n

\u201cOn the other hand,\u201d he added, \u201cif we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dennis W. Sciama, a cosmologist and Dr. Hawking\u2019s thesis adviser at Cambridge, called Hawking\u2019s thesis in Nature \u201cthe most beautiful paper in the history of physics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Official website :<\/strong> http:\/\/www.hawking.org.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n

WIKI :<\/strong> https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stephen_Hawking<\/a><\/p>\n