Steven Hawking

Steven Hawking

A Documentation of Steven Hawking

And his Life's Great Work

"A Brief History of Time"

In order to truly understand Steven Hawking and all his crazy theories and pure genius that makes anyone who tries or has tried to figure out what he is talking about, feel like someone who hasn't passed 1st grade. First a brief biography on his life and then I will, with the help of Mr. Hawking himself (actually his online website), try to explain some of his mind-boggling theories in my own words.

There are two indisputable facts about Stephen Hawking.

One: The British theoretical physicist is a wizard of applied mathematics and a titan of astronomy. Hawking peers light-years away into space without a telescope and conquers uncharted mathematical terrain without a computer.

Two: He has been paralyzed with Lou Gehrig's disease for 30 years. In 56-year-old Hawking's case, this means that although he feels no pain, virtually every muscle (save those around his eyes) is useless.

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, in 1942. After the London blitz of World War II, his family moved to the suburbs, where Stephen and his three younger siblings grew up. The Hawkings' was a somber household in which the entire family often spent evenings quietly reading His father, a physician, researched tropical diseases and took an active role in getting his gifted son admitted to England's best schools.

In his younger years Stephen's mind was mature. At a time when only a handful of computers existed in all of Britain, and most of those were in the military, Hawking and a group of high school friends built one from scratch using old phone switches and relays. It could solve logical problems and was written up in t...

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...ns and two neutrons) comes shooting out of the nucleus at high speed. In the second, an energetic beta particle (an electron or its antiparticle, a positron) is emitted. And in the third, which usually follows immediately after an alpha or beta decay, a high-energy gamma-ray photon radiates from the nucleus. The amount of energy released in radioactive decay depends on the difference in mass between the original and final nucleus multiplied by the speed of light squared, as expressed by Einstein's famous E=mc2 equation.

Now that I've delved my mind into one of genius, and certainly felt like a meager 1st grade failure with my rudimentary knowledge while doing it, I hope I have helped explain some rather complex theories by reading and rereading lots of text on Mr. Hawking and provided some information on the crippled scientists struggles to become a famous author.