If you were to mention the name "Stephen Hawking" in a group of people, a few different things may come to mind. You may think of his controversial views on religion, his debilitating disease, or his theories of how the universe was formed. This essay will dive into all of these topics, including many other facts of Stephen Hawking's life.
Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. He was born to parents Frank and Isobel Hawking in Oxford, England. His parents lived in north London, but due to the Second World War, Oxford was considered a safer place to deliver a child. Around his eighth birthday, his family moved to St. Albans, a town located about twenty miles north of London. He then began to attend St. Albans School, where he was around a middle of the class student. After graduating from St. Albans, he went on to attend Oxford University. Stephen originally wanted to study mathematics at Oxford, but the course was not offered at the time. He then majored in physics, and after three years of very little work, he graduated with a first class honors degree in Natural Science. A few years later, Stephen moved on to study Cosmology at Cambridge University. While at Cambridge, he met his future wife, Jane Wilde, who was attracted to his sense of humor. He went on to graduate with honors and is still a part of the college today, as he holds an office at the Department for Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics.
Only a few days after his twenty-first birthday, Stephen was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). This disease causes the slow degeneration of motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, which leads to the loss major muscle movement and eve...
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...hey ever found one. It does, however, give geniuses like Stephen Hawking something to think about and study every day.
Hawking is also seen as a very controversial figure due to his outspoken disbelief of religion. He has published many books on the topic of how the universe was created, including The Grand Design. He is an outspoken atheist, and has never hid that opinion from the public. This affects society by giving people another view on religion and how the universe was created.
Stephen Hawking has lived a strained personal life due to all of the challenges in his life. His first marriage to Jane Wilde, ended with divorce in 1991. Hawking then married a former nurse and long time friend, Elaine Mason, in 1995. However, the marriage ended bitterly in 2007. He currently lives in Cambridge, England, with multiple nurses who help take care of him.
It is truly remarkable how Randy Pausch and Morrie Schwartz stories are so similar but yet so different. They both seem to have an outlook on life in a positive way, not sad or demeaning. The only crippling difference is the fact that Morrie was at the age that wasn’t abnormal to be sick and Randy was just dealt the cards for a short life. One of Professor Randy Pausch’s many quotes during The Last Lecture makes a similar point between his experience and Morrie’s when he says, “…it’s hard to raise awareness of pancreatic cancer – people who get it don’t live long enough.” ALS is such a rehabilitating disease that scientist have issues pinpointing the causes to even get close to a cure, which didn’t hinder either of their strive to keep going as far as they could.
Stephen King was born 9-21-47 in Portland, Maine. King has black hair that is thick, he has blue eyes and wears glasses. Stephen’s parents are Donald and Nellie Pillsbury King, and they split up when King was very young. King also has one brother who is older than him named David. During the time he was little, Stephen was into scary things from the start and he had always watch and listen to scary stories, which later inspire him to create his own. King then grew up and attended school at the University of Maine in Orono.
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, commonly referred to as ALS, is a disease that can alter the daily life of a human in monumental and unending ways. In one of her articles about ALS, Caroline Ingre (2015) states that the disease is a “fatal neurodegenerative disorder” and further supports this by noting how the disease is marked by the degeneration in motor neurons in the brain, brainstem, and spinal cord (p. 181). This basically means that
Lou Gehrig's disease is often referred to as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), this is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons come from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the entire body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS would eventually leads to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is also lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, for this reason patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed (Choi, 1988).
ALS is a degeneration of motor neurons that move from the brain and down the
reality normally consists of two parts: a) A set of local laws that are obeyed
Carl Sagan: astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, skeptic, and visionary. The middle of the twentieth century was clad in scientific advancements that opened up the realm of our universe to the world. At the head of this exploration was Carl Sagan, a pioneer of sorts. Aside from his countless contributions to the scientific community, he backed a new understanding of the cosmos to the more pedestrian population of the world.
Hawking, Stephen. “Our Picture of the Universe.” Fields of Reading. 6th ed. Ed. Nancy R. Comely et al. New York: St. Martin’s, 2001. (565-574)
First, even from birth this mathematical and theoretical genius has an irregular story. Hawking had been born on the three hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s death, this proving later to be a great point of inspiration and motivation for him and his research. The date being January 8, 1942, a later recognized genius was born
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, is a degenerative disease affecting the human nervous system. It is a deadly disease that cripples and kills its victims due to a breakdown in the body’s motor neurons. Motor neurons are nerve cells in the brainstem and spinal cord that control muscle contractions. In ALS, these neurons deteriorate to a point that all movement, including breathing, halts. Muscle weakness first develops in the muscles of body parts distant from the brain, such as the hands, and subsequently spreads through other muscle groups closer to the brain. Such early symptoms as this, however, can hardly be noticed.
Imagine if you loss control of your body but your mind stayed unaffected. You would be a prisoner in your own body, all leading up to your death sentence. That is the sad fate for the people diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). “Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a neurodegenerative disorder was first described by Ran in 1850. This description was then expanded in 1873 by Charcot, who emphasized the involvement of the corticospinal tracts. In the United States, ALS is often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease, after the famous ball player who was stricken by the disease in the midst of his career. (Yale School of Medicine, 2014)” In this paper will go through the definition, the process, the signs, the risk factors, etiology, and discus the known people that have suffered with this terminal disease.
Steve Jobs was born on Feburary 24, 1995 in Green Bay Wisconsin. His biological mother put him up for adaptation, because she could not care for him and give him a good child hood. She requested that her son to be placed with a well-educated family. When Steve Jobs was growing up he Didn’t have any friends so he wandered to neighbors garages looking to learn more about electronics because a lot of them were engineers. Steve jobs liked fiddling with electronics so much that he spent his time after school at the packyard electronics company learning more in depth about how to make electronic devices. Steve jobs had a hard time focusing in class. Until his fourth grade teacher found a way to get him to focus in class it was by bribing him to do his work. That worked so well that the school recommended him to skip fifth grade and go straight to junior high. Steve jobs told his parents he did not like the school that he was going to, and wanted to change schools. Steve Jobs and his parents moved to silicon valley where there was a premiere school for electronics and technology. He found a friend when he was in high school that was a geek just like him, that friend was Stephen Woznick. Stephen Woznic...
disease that Stephen Hawking has) 5 years ago. This is a condition that destroys motor nerves, making control of movement impossible, while the mind is virtually unaffected. People with motor neurone disease normally die within 4 years of diagnosis from suffocation due to the inability of the inspiratory muscles to contract. The woman's condition has steadily declined. She is not expected to live through the month, and is worried about the pain that she will face in her final hours. She asks her doctor to give her diamorphine for pain if she begins to suffocate or choke. This will lessen her pain, but it will also hasten her death. About a week later, she falls very ill, and is having trouble breathing.
This is a neurodegenerative disease, meaning it results in progressive loss or death of neurons. It often starts off with effecting simple motor skills like writing and holding things, after a few months usually patients start losing the ability to walk, talk, or move any of their limbs. Although the brain trauma is what causes it, ALS has little-no-effect on the brain. This fatal disease is typically diagnosed around age 60 and most patients are given about 3-5 years to live after being diagnosed. It has been found that 10% of cases are shown as genetic. It was brought to attention that athletes were beginning to get diagnosed with ALS at a younger age than most. After extensive research in the early 2000’s, Brain Analyst, Dr. Mckee ran tests and finally came to the conclusion that the toxic proteins in the brains of ALS patients were coming from repeated blows to the head. It was then made evident why so many athletes in contact sports such as football, soccer, boxing, etc… were being diagnosed at such a young age and more frequently than