The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.
In the early hours of Wednesday, 14th March, 2018, the death was announced of Stephen W. Hawking, Cambridge University Physicist and bestselling author who, for the most part of his career, was confined to a wheelchair and contributed incredibly to the study of the cosmos, “pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity”.
He died at age 76.
A spokesperson for the Cambridge University confirmed the death and expressed that no scientist has captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people as much as Mr. Stephen Hawking since Albert Einstein.
Stephen Hawking, who was diagnosed with a rare and slow-progressing form of motor neuron disease known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or ALS which gradually paralysed him over the decades, was able to communicate by the help of a speech-generating device, initially through the use of a hand-held switch, and eventually by using a single cheek muscle.
The Man, Stephen Hawking
Born on 8th of January 1942 in Oxford to Frank and Isobel Hawking, Stephen Hawking was introduced to intellectuality quite early. Despite the constraints with finances, both his parents attended the University of Oxford where Frank read medicine and Isobel, who was Scottish, read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. The two met shortly after the Second World War began at a medical research institute where Isobel was working as a Secretary and Frank was working as a Medical Researcher.
Young Hawking started schooling at the Byron House School in Highgate, London. When his father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research and the family moved to St. Albans, Hertfordshire, Hawking was enrolled at St. Albans High School for Girls for a few months because at that time, younger boys could attend one of the houses.
Hawking began his University education at University College, Oxford, in October 1959 at the age of 17. For the first 18 months, Hawking was bored and lonely because he found the academic work “ridiculously easy”. However, during his second and third year, a change occurred and he made more of an effort to be “one of the boys”.
He soon developed into a popular, lively and witty college member who was interested in classical music and science fiction. And he eventually graduated with a first-class BA (Hons.) degree in Natural Science. After his degree, he commenced his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in October 1962. The next year, Hawking was diagnosed with ALS. He was 21 years old and given two years to live, but the prediction turned out to be inaccurate.
The Universe in a Nutshell
In 2001, Stephen Hawking published The Universe in a Nutshell, a book about theoretical physics. In it, he explains to a general audience, various matters relating to the Lucasian professor’s work such as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and P-branes (part of superstring theory in quantum mechanics).
He tells the history and principles of modern physics and seeks to combine Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and Feynman’s idea of multiple histories into one complete unified theory that will explain everything that happens in the Universe. He couldn’t.
Impact of his work on Human Technological Advancements
Scientifically, Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.
He went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.
That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.
Geniuses who had health deficiencies and disabilities
Albert Einstein If he’s not the most famous intellectual in American history, he’s certainly close. But Einstein’s achievements in the fields of mathematics and physics didn’t come without challenges. Suffering from a learning disability, it’s reputed that Einstein did not learn to talk until age four and was often confronted by teachers for his inability to grasp concepts as fast as other students. It’s possible he was experiencing symptoms of dyslexia.
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. The story of how Keller’s teacher, Annie Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become known worldwide through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. Sullivan taught Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with d-o-l-l for the doll that she had brought her as a present. A prolific author, Keller was well traveled and was outspoken in her opposition to war. She campaigned for women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, and socialism, as well as many other progressive causes. In 1920, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller and Sullivan traveled to over 39 countries, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favourite of the Japanese people. Keller met every US President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin, and Mark Twain.
John Forbes Nash is a Noble laureate American mathematician whose work in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations are considered groundbreaking. At a young age, he was interested in scientific experiments which he carried out in his room. He studied Chemical engineering, chemistry and mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. Later he was awarded a Fellowship at Princeton. In 1959 John Nash started showing severe signs of paranoia and started behaving erratically. He believed that there was an organization chasing him. In the same year, he was admitted involuntarily to the hospital where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After treatment, he was again admitted to the hospital, this time voluntarily for 9 years, where he was given shock therapy. After returning from the hospital in 1970 he gradually started recovering. His work was becoming more successful and resulted in various awards and recognition. Prominent among them is John von Neumann Theory Prize in the year 1978 and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 1994. An Academy Award-winning film named ‘A beautiful Mind’ starring Russell Crowe was made which was loosely based on his biography.
