Jan 8, 2016

Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking: Some lesser-known facts about the renowned physicist

Even if we are not the ardent followers of physics, it is impossible that we have not heard the name, Stephen Hawking. The author of A Brief History of Time was born on January 8, in the year 1942 and today, he celebrates his 74th birthday. He is pretty famous for Hawking radiation, Penrose-Hawking theorems and his book A Brief History of Time.

On Stephen Hawking's 74th birthday today, listed are some facts you should not miss about the physicist:
  • Hawking suffers from a rare and slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The disease has paralysed him over the decades
  • He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease when he was 21, in 1963. At that time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of only two years
  • Over the years, he slowly lost the ability to write, but developed visual methods which included seeing equations in terms of geometry
  • In school, Hawking was famous for his reputation for brashness. He was nicknamed 'Einstein' even though he was just an average scorer
  • When he was nine years old, his grades were classified among the worst in his class
  • From an early age he was interested in how stuff worked. He has admitted that he used to disassemble clocks and radios but never knew how to put them back together
  • In the year 1966, he completed doctoral work in theoretical physics and submitted a thesis on black holes. In 1970, he discovered that black holes emit radiation
  • Hawking gradually lost the use of his hand, and in 2005, he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles
  • In 2015, Stephen Hawking helped launch Breakthrough Initiatives which was an effort to search for extra-terrestrial life and attempt to answer the question ''Are we alone?''
  • Hawking has often expressed concerns that life on Earth is at risk from "a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of"
  • Hawking has also argued that computer viruses should be considered a new form of life.

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