Farewell to a Bright Mind

Known to the world as a physicist, astrophysicist, cosmologist and science popularizer, Stephen William Hawking dies a day like today at age 76. The most important contributions of his career are based on the discovery of radiation in black holes and the combination of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

He was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, after his parents fled from London because of the German bombing that was taking place in that city. Years later the family returns and Stephen starts his studies in institutes that accepted male children until he was 11 years old. His academic performance was far from impressive, but his brilliance was recognized by his colleagues after he demonstrated his great ability to understand science, sometimes nicknamed him as "Einstein".

In 1959 he wanted to study mathematics at the University of Oxford, but at that time there was no teacher in the discipline that taught the classes, so he enrolled in natural sciences and got a scholarship. Once internal, she specialized in physics which she managed to carry out with a study calculation of one (1) average hour per day. However, cosmology was captured its maximum interest, because its goal was to obtain a complete knowledge of the universe, its origin, why it exists and why it is as it is.

At age 21, he suffered a motor neuron disease that conditioned his life with the passage of time, leaving him almost completely motionless in a wheelchair and unable to speak. He could only flex one finger and lightly move a muscle under his eye, enough to express his thoughts through a computer that interpreted his voice. The doctors projected him two (2) more years of life, in which Stephen dedicated them to listen to musical opera, science fiction reading and drinking. With the passage of time the disease stopped and Stephen returned with enthusiasm to the research, living another 54 years.

In 1965 he married a philosophy partner from whom his three (3) children were born and 25 years later the relationship was broken. He remarried in 1995 but this time with one of his nurses, whose previous husband was the one who had created his speech synthesizer device. Later that she described him in his book as an "almighty emperor" and she as "someone willing to gild her feet" they divorced for alleged physical injuries that she inflicted on him according to multiple backups of various nurses in the hospital.

The overwhelming intellect of Hawking, plus his intuition, his sense of humor and his degenerative disease, made him a modern icon of popular culture, of the infinite possibilities of the human mind and its insatiable enthusiasm for discovering the unknown.

Named as Professor Hawking, he explained the universe from a wheelchair and brought the stars to millions of people around the world. On his 60th birthday he climbed in a hot air balloon, five years later he tested zero gravity aboard a Boeing 727 and when asked why he did all that, he replied: "I want to show that people should not be limited by physical disabilities , as long as his spirit is not disabled".