Stephen Hawking – Author Biography
Early Life
Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. He studied physics at University College, Oxford, and then moved to Cambridge for graduate research in cosmology. At age 21, while pursuing his Ph.D., he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease. Doctors gave him only a few years to live — he would defy that prognosis by more than five decades.
Career
Hawking became one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, holding Cambridge’s prestigious Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009 — the chair once held by Isaac Newton. His landmark 1974 discovery that black holes emit radiation, now called Hawking radiation, united quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and general relativity. As ALS progressively paralyzed him, he communicated through a speech synthesizer, becoming as famous for his resilience and wit as for his science.
Major Works
A Brief History of Time (1988) explained the universe’s biggest questions for general readers and spent years on bestseller lists, selling over 25 million copies. He followed it with Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), A Briefer History of Time (2005, with Leonard Mlodinow), The Grand Design (2010), The Theory of Everything (2002, drawn from his lectures), and the children’s series George’s Secret Key to the Universe with his daughter Lucy.
Writing Style and Themes
Hawking wrote about the cosmos with rare clarity and mischievous humor, translating forbidding mathematics into vivid images and thought experiments. His books return to the deepest questions: How did the universe begin? Will it end? What is the nature of time? He argued that science could answer questions once left to philosophy and religion, and he wrote with an infectious sense that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine but more comprehensible than we fear.
Legacy
Hawking died on March 14, 2018, and was buried in Westminster Abbey between Newton and Darwin. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009 and became a global icon of the triumph of mind over physical limitation. His life was dramatized in the Oscar-winning film The Theory of Everything (2014). He remains the most famous scientist of the modern era and the author who brought cosmology to the masses.
