The renowned British scientist and disseminator has died at his home in Cambridge
At age 22 he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and the doctors gave him only two years to live. But he lived 54 years more. The illness left him in a wheelchair and unable to speak without the help of a voice synthesizer. It reduced the control of your body to the flexion of a finger and the movement of the eyes. His overwhelming intellect, his intuition, his strength and his sense of humor, combined with a destructive disease, made Hawking a symbol of the infinite possibilities of the human mind, and of his insatiable curiosity.
"Although there was a cloud over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I enjoyed life more in the present than I had ever enjoyed it," he once said. "My goal is simple, it is a complete knowledge of the universe, why it is the way it is and why it exists."
Friends and colleagues from the University of Cambridge have paid tribute to him with a video about the scientific and life path of Hawking - always named "Professor Hawking", which was as he was cited in the world of science - and a tribute text In the penultimate paragraph, a lecture by the professor on his 75th birthday is summed up: "It has been a glorious moment to be alive and to investigate theoretical physics, our image of the Universe has changed a lot in the last 50 years, and I am happy to have made a small contribution ".
Professor Stephen Toope, vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge, has also paid tribute to him with these words: "Professor Hawking was a unique person who will be remembered with affection and affection not only in Cambridge, but throughout the world. scientific knowledge and the popularization of science and mathematics have left an indelible legacy, his character was an inspiration for millions.
Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, the eldest of the four children of the prestigious biologist Frank Hawking and Isobel Walker, who had arrived in the university city fleeing the German bombing of London. His childhood would be marked by the bohemian life of a family whose family car was a classic black London taxi.
Stephen was a mediocre student in St Albans, London, but his brilliance was recognized by his colleagues who nicknamed him "Einstein" for his ability to understand science. He enrolled in mathematics and physics at Oxford in 1959, studies that he found so easy that, according to him he calculated, he got ahead with only a thousand hours of study: one a day.
