Everyone knew of Stephen Hawking's cosmic brilliance, but few could comprehend it. Not even top-notch astronomers. Hawking, who died at his home in Cambridge, England, on Wednesday at age 76, became the public face of science genius. He dies at his home, his family said. He appeared on "Star Trek: The Next Generation," voiced himself in "The Simpsons" cartoon series and wrote the best seller "A Brief History of Time."
He sold 9 million copies of
that book, though many readers didn't finish it. It's been called "the
least-read best-seller ever." In some ways, Hawking was the inheritor of
Albert Einstein's mantle of the genius-as-celebrity.
"His contribution is
to engage the public in a way that maybe hasn't happened since Einstein,"
said prominent astronomer Wendy Freedman, director of the Carnegie
Observatories. "He's become an icon for a mind that is beyond ordinary
mortals. ... People don't exactly understand what he's saying, but they know
he's brilliant. There's perhaps a human element of his struggle that makes people
stop and pay attention."
With Einstein, most people
are familiar with e=mc2, but they don't know what it means. With Hawking, his
work was too complicated for most people, but they understood that what he was
trying to figure out was basic, even primal.
"He was asking and
trying to address the very biggest questions we were trying to ask: the birth
of the universe, black holes, the direction of time," said University of
Chicago cosmologist Michael Turner. "I think that caught people's attention."
And he did so in an impish
way, showing humanity despite being confined to a wheelchair with ALS, the
degenerative nerve disorder known in the U.S. as Lou Gehrig's disease. He flew
in a zero-gravity plane. He made public bets with other scientists about the
existence of black holes and radiation that emanates from them — losing both
bets and buying a subscription to Penthouse for one scientist and a baseball
encyclopedia for the other.
"The first thing that catches you is the debilitating disease and
his wheelchair," Turner said.
But then his mind and the
"joy that he took in science" dominated. And while the public may not
have understood what he said, they got his quest for big ideas, Turner said.
Andy Fabian, an astronomer
at Hawking's University of Cambridge and president of the Royal Astronomical
Society, said Hawking would start his layman's lectures on black holes with the
joke: "I assume you all have read 'A Brief History of Time' and understood
it." It always got a big laugh.
"You'd find the
average astronomer such as myself doesn't even try to follow the more esoteric
theories that (Hawking) pursued the last 20 years," Fabian said.
"I've been to talks Hawking has given and cannot follow them myself."
Hawking, who was born 300 years to the day after Galileo died, was the Lucasian
Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.
It was the same post that
Isaac Newton held. Both physicists and astrophysicists claimed him as their
own. And much of Hawking's work was in the field of cosmology, a deep-thinking
branch of astronomy that tries to explain the totality of the universe.
Hawking's title "is
not relevant here; what matters is what his brain did," said Neil deGrasse
Tyson, director of New York's Hayden Planetarium. "We claim him as an
astrophysicist because his laboratory was the universe."
And Hawking's black hole
work in the mid-1970s made a crucial connection in physics. Until Hawking
discovered radiation coming from black holes — named "Hawking
radiation" after him — the two giant theories in physics, Einstein's
general relativity and quantum mechanics, often conflicted. Hawking was the
first to show they connected, which Turner and others described as breakthrough
at the time.
The concept that stuff,
radiation, comes out of black holes may have upset science fiction authors, but
it inspired young scientists such as Tyson, who described it as "spooky
profound."
The idea behind this was
also novel because it said "black holes aren't forever," Turner said.
Hawking also pioneered a "no hair" theory of black holes that they
were simple, with just spin, mass and charge and nothing else. Both of those
concepts are cornerstones of current black hole theory.
Hawking's other work went beyond black holes into the more cosmic, the
origins of the universe. Initially he theorized about the
"singularity" of the baby universe in thick but elegant mathematical
equations comparing early time to wave functions. Later, his own work
contradicted some of that and he was instrumental to theories about
inflationary cosmology, where the universe's beginning is more of a half ball.
That theory got its
kick-start at a conference Hawking hosted in 1982 with a dinner party and
croquet match, Turner said. The high-concept theory-making didn't quite match
the personality behind it. Colleagues often mention his off-the-wall humor, his
big grin, his stubbornness.
And even the public picked
up on his cheeky attitude instantly, Turner and Freedman said. "He added a
human face to science," Turner said. "It goes well beyond the
wheelchair."
The bigger story was how
the public became fascinated with this small man, stuck in a wheelchair with a
worsening disease, and an intellect that few could fathom. They related to the
man, Stephen Hawking, and his story, Freedman said. The insight he gave on the
mysteries of the cosmos was just a bonus. Today is a very sad day.
Via ABCnews