Leading British physicist Stephen Hawking dies aged 76
Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s most celebrated scientists, has died at the age of 76. His children Lucy, Robert and Tim said their “beloved father” and “extraordinary man” has passed away at home in Cambridge. The leading British physicist explained the Universe to millions by being a truly remarkable communicator and ambassador for science.
Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, to a research biologist father and his mother moved from London to escape German bombing. He grew up in London and St Albans and gained a first-class degree in physics from Oxford and went on to Cambridge for postgraduate research in cosmology.
Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 and was given two years to live. Instead, his brilliant academic career devoted to unravelling the mysteries of the universe, and his books A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, was a bestseller. But it was his wicked sense of humour, wild driving around Cambridge, his lecture at the White House in the 1990s and being given the Hollywood biopic treatment in the Theory of Everything, made the wheelchair using scientist popular. Hawking’s name-checked was used in The Simpsons and Pink Floyd’s Album The Division Bell.
Today also is the birthday of Albert Einstein who was born on 14 March 1879 to 18th April 1955, a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics alongside Quantum mechanics.