The renowned Physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who made remarkable achievements throughout his life, passed away today at the age of 76. The news broke out after a statement issued by his family confirming about the demise in the early hours of Wednesday morning.
He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the age of 21. He was suffering from a slow form of motor neuron disease that gradually paralyzed him over decades. Initially, doctors thought he would live only for 2 years but since the disease progressed rather slowly, he survived until the age of 76.
Despite his disease and the inability to move, Professor Hawking dedicated his whole life to the world of cosmology. He was an extraordinary person who will always remain irreplaceable. For his fellow scientists and close ones, he would always be remembered for a wicked sense of humor.
The first breakthrough of his career was in 1970 when he applied the mathematics of black holes to the entire universe. He showed the world that singularity is a region of infinite curvature in space-time, the point from where big bang started. Later in 1974, he proposed that black holes radiate heat which led to several debates in modern cosmology.
His radical discoveries led him towards his election to the Royal Society in 1974 at the young age of 32. Five years later, he became the Lucasian professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, which is Britain’s most distinguished chair. In 1982, he was among the first to show how quantum fluctuations might give rise to inflation to the spread of galaxies in the universe.
Professor Stephen Hawking had 13 honorary degrees and received several awards and medals including the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009), Copley Medal (2006), the Fundamental Physics Prize (2013), and the Wolf Foundation Prize (1988).
