WHO IS STEPHEN HAWKING
(Stephen William Hawking, Oxford, 1942 - Cambridge, 2018) British theoretical physicist. Despite his physical disabilities and the progressive limitations imposed by the degenerative disease he suffered, Stephen Hawking is probably the best known physicist among the public since Einstein's time. Wrestler and winner, throughout his life he managed to overcome the immensity of impediments posed by the evil of Lou Gehrig, a lateral amyotrophic sclerosis that afflicted him since he was twenty years old. Hawking was, without a doubt, a particular case of vitality and resistance against the misfortune of destiny.
Biography
On January 8, 1942, the day on which three hundred years after the death of Galileo, Stephen Hawking was born in the city of Oxford. Like many others of middle class, his family supported with integrity the rigors of the Second World War; Towards the end of the race, a German V2 rocket fell a few dozen meters from his home in Highgate, north of London. After high school, Hawking entered the University College of Oxford, where he graduated in 1962 with the titles of mathematician and physicist. At that time he was a normal life boy, whose singularities were only his brilliant intelligence and a great interest in science.
But in 1963, in the course of an ice skating session, the young Stephen slipped and had difficulty getting up. He was immediately diagnosed with a degenerative neuromuscular disorder, ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The doctors assumed that the disease was going to end his life in a few years; however, they were wrong. Naturally, Stephen's life was not the same thereafter, but his physical limitations did not interrupt his intellectual activity at any time; in fact, they increased it.
In October 1962 he had begun his PhD studies at Trinity Hall in Cambridge. He requested to work with Fred Hoyle, but the famous astronomer had too many suitors and the request was denied; many years later, Hawking himself would see the positive side: had he been accepted, he would probably have been forced to defend Hoyle's stationary state theory, discredited after the discovery of microwave background radiation in 1965.
Con Jane Wayline el día de la boda (1965)
While studying for his doctorate, he married Jane Wayline (1965), with whom he would have three children. After almost twenty-five years of life together, in 1990 the couple separated and the scientist went to live with Elaine Mason, one of the nurses who looked after him and with whom five years later he got married; this second relationship would continue until 2007. After obtaining the title of doctor in theoretical physics (1966), his passion for the study of the origin of the universe was increasing, and his research focused on the field of general relativity, particularly in the physics of black holes, first described by Robert Oppenheimer in 1939.
Certainly, Hawking is not only comparable to Albert Einstein for its popularity: like the formulator of the theory of relativity, Stephen Hawking set out the ambitious goal of harmonizing general relativity and quantum mechanics, in search of a unification of the physical that would account for both the universe and subatomic phenomena. In 1971 he suggested the formation, after the big bang, of numerous objects called "black holes", which would contain about a billion metric tons of mass, but would occupy only the space of a proton, a circumstance that would originate enormous gravitational fields, ruled by the laws of relativity.
His studies on black holes would lead him to combine for the first time the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics to solve the problem of studying these structures of very small dimensions and extraordinarily high density, which was not believed to be obtainable some knowledge In 1974 he proposed, according to the predictions of quantum physics, that black holes emit thermal radiation until their energy is exhausted and extinguished. Hawking has also explored some singularities of the space-time binomial.
Fotograma de La teoría del todo (2014), filme basado en la vida de Hawking