07-05-2013, 02:39 PM
Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking.ppt (Size: 598.5 KB / Downloads: 19)
Life as a Child
Hawking was born on the 8th day of January in the year 1942. This day was also the 300th anniversary of Galileo’s death. He was born in Oxford, England, which was where his parents had relocated themselves to during World War 2. The Hawking family then moved again to St. Albans when Stephen was eight.
College and his career
After attending St. Albans School, Hawking went to University College, which was the college that his father had gone to. Even though his father wanted him to pursue a career as a doctor, Hawking instead took up physics. He wanted to pursue mathematics, but sadly couldn’t at University College. After three years at University, he graduated with honors and moved along to Cambridge University, where he would go after a Ph.D. in cosmology.
Cambridge and ALS
During his first year at Cambridge, Hawking started noticing problems with his health. He would occasionally slur his words and would sometimes trip and fall while walking around. Stephen refused to tell anyone about these problems, but eventually, his father noticed and sent him to a doctor. After a series of tests, doctors diagnosed him with ALS (A.K.A Lou Gehrig’s disease) and said he only had 30 months to live. But the disease didn’t stop him from his research.
The Causes and Effects of ALS
Lou Gehrig was the first person to have ALS. Today, the disease is named after him. ALS is passed down through family genes, and affects 5 out of every 100,000 people all over the world. ALS causes nerves to weaken and eventually die, which will make a person unable to move their limbs. Symptoms include, but are not limited to paralysis, difficulty breathing, speech problems and muscle contractions. There are tests you can take to see if you have it, but there is no known cure.
Black hole research
Around the time that Hawking had been diagnosed with ALS, another cosmologist by the name of Roger Primrose had been busy, creating a theory about the life (and death) of stars and how black holes were created. This in itself caused Hawking to wonder about how the universe began. Hawking had his first child, Robert in 1967 with his first wife, Jane, and became a member of the Institute of Astronomy and in 1968. Even though Stephen was forced into a wheelchair in 1969, he was still able to continue their research. He had his daughter Lucy in 1969, showed the world that radiation is emitted when stars collapse in 1974,(this radiation was named Hawking radiation) and came out with his first book, Large Scale Structure of Space Time in 1975.
Life in the 1970’s
Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society at age 32, earned the Albert Einstein award, and was awarded the Pius XI Gold Medal for Science in Rome. Stephen was then named the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University in 1979. Around this time, his ALS started to get much worse. He could still get out of bed by himself and could feed himself, but couldn’t do anything else without some sort of assistance. After a tracheotomy operation, he lost his voice completely in 1985. After this, he had to use a speech synthesizer. But this did not stop him either; he still continued his research. In 1988, Stephen’s book, A Brief History of Time, got published. Since then, it has sold over 25 million copies and has been translated into more than 40 languages.
1990’s to the present
Hawking left his current wife Jane in 1990 and married Elaine Mason, who was one of his nurses at the time, in ‘95. Even though A Brief History of Time has sold over 25 million copies, it was not so simple to comprehend. Hawking’s next book, The Universe In a Nutshell was published in 2001. It cleared up what A Brief History of Time obscured. In 2005, Stephen made his theories even less complicated by releasing A Briefer History of Time. He divorced Elaine in 2006 and then experienced zero-G at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida the following year. He then announced he was retiring from his post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University in 2009.