Stephen Hawking: Life and Activities

The name of Stephen Hawking is known today to almost everyone, regardless of the proximity to the lessons of mathematics or physics. After all, apart from a significant contribution to the development of modern physics and cosmology, the scientist is famous for popularizing science, explaining in his books the complex concepts of constructing the universe in plain language.

Stephen Hawking. Biography

The future astrophysicist was born in January 1942. Hawking Stephen William became the first child in the family of the researcher Frank Hooking Medical Center and his wife - Isabel Hawking. Later, two more girls appeared in the family. At the end of the school, the eldest son enters Oxford University in 1959. After graduating in 1962, Stephen Hawking continues his education and scientific work in the field of cosmology already in Cambridge. Today, everyone knows the image of an almost completely paralyzed scientist, chained to a wheelchair and able to communicate exclusively with the device synthesizing the voice. This problem manifested itself at a young age. At the third year of university, when he was 21, the young man noticed that he has problems with spatial coordination. Survey of doctors gave disappointing results: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and only two more years of life. However, the young man not only survived, but also retained an interest in the world around him, which gave him the strength to engage in scientific activities.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to overcome the disease completely, and by the age of thirty, Stephen Hawking had been chained to a wheelchair. Moreover, the disease progresses inexorably to this day, the nerve behind the nerve, the muscle behind the muscle, immobilizing the scientist. At the same time, this did not prevent him from leading an active social and personal life. In 1965, he married his university friend Jane Wilde, who later gave him three children. In 1979, Stephen Hawking became head of the Department of Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics at Cambridge University. Once upon a time this chair was headed by Issak Newton. In 1991, the scientist is going through a divorce with Jane. And four years later he married Alvin Mason, with whom he lived until 2006.

Scientific contribution

Such mass fame Stephen Hawking achieved, thanks not so much to its scientific developments, but rather the popularization of modern science among
The public. World popularity was brought to him by the World History of Time, published in 1988. This book is original in that it narrates about complex Theories of the structure of our universe by popular philistine language, without the use of complex mathematical formulas. As for the scientific field itself, the main research of physics falls on quantum gravity and astrophysics. So, Stephen Hawking is an advanced researcher of mysterious black holes of space. He also made a significant contribution to the development of the Big Bang Theory, according to which our universe appeared without cause, suddenly and nowhere. The initial state of the world is described by the concept of singularity, where all modern space was once concentrated in one tiny point with infinite density and temperature. The Large Hadron Collider, which does not descend today from the mouth of the media, is also partly the result of Hawking's activities. It was created to study the smallest particles (bosons, quarks), to search for new elements and, possibly, new fundamental laws of physics at the micro level.