Stephen Hawking is a British cosmologist famous for his groundbreaking theories about black holes and his battle with motor neuron disease.
In the 1970s Hawking announced his theory that black holes lose mass by emitting energy (now called Hawking radiation) and eventually disappear. Thirty years later, Hawking surprised the world of physics by admitting he was wrong about his previous assertion that information about an object is lost once it falls into a black hole. Hawking had long argued the opposite viewpoint in the so-called 'information paradox' debate that was started by his theories.
Image: Hawking experiences weightlessness in 2007 aboard an aircraft (credit: NASA)
Stephen Hawking discusses the concept of imaginary time and how he used this idea to get around the problem of the singularity, a point of infinite density at the start of the Universe predicted by Einstein's equations.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars paved the way for the acceptance of black holes as a serious idea.
Astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle rejected the Big Bang theory. Instead, he proposed an alternative idea - the Steady State theory - which did away with the Big Bang theory's need for a start to the Universe.
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein–Hawking radiation).
He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009. Subsequently, he became research director at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.
Hawking has a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years. He is now almost completely paralysed and communicates through a speech generating device. He has been married twice and has three children. Hawking has achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
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