DISABLED NOT IN MIND BUT IN BODY - STEPHEN HAWKING

 

DISABLED NOT IN MIND BUT IN BODY   -  STEPHEN  HAWKING

Was he born handicapped ?  No.  The last five  decades before he died at the age of  76, he was on wheelchair.

 

Hawking’s cause of death was likely Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, a neurodegenerative disease that wears away at nerve and muscle function over time. He was first diagnosed with ALS more than five decades ago, at the age of 21, and was initially given just a few years to live — making the very nature of his long, illustrious career as much of a scientific marvel as the theories and discoveries it yielded.

ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that erodes motor neurons — cells in the brain and spinal cord that control muscular function — until it becomes difficult or impossible for a person to walk, talk, speak, swallow and breathe, according to the ALS Association. ALS symptoms often begin with slurred speech or muscle weakness and twitching, according to the Mayo Clinic, and get worse over time. The rate at which a person’s condition degrades can vary quite a bit, though the average survival time is three years after diagnosis, the ALS Association says.

While there’s no cure for ALS, the condition can be managed with medication, physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy. Some patients also use ventilators to assist with breathing.

 

Stephen Hawking, in full Stephen William Hawking, (born January 8, 1942, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England during World War II,  (died March 14, 2018, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire), was an English  theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author whose theory of exploding black holes drew upon both relativity, theory and quantum mechanics.  He also worked with space-time singularities. 

Stephen Hawking at the time of his death, was Director of Research  at the Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.

 

He married twice and had two sons and a daughter.  

 

 

 

                       Hawking and friends enjoy the good life at Oxford during the early 1960's.

 

 

Hawking studied physics at University College, Oxford (B.A., 1962), and Trinity Hall, Cambridge (Ph.D., 1966).   He was elected a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge.

In the early 1960s Hawking contracted Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an incurable degenerative neuromuscular disease.  He continued to work despite the disease's progressively disabling effects.

ALS is frequently called Lou Gehrig disease in memory of the famous baseball player Lou Gehrig, who died from the disease in 1941.

 

 

                              

 

The progress of the disease in Hawking's case has been slow, but by the time he became Lucasian Professor  (a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton), he could no longer walk, write, feed himself, or raise his head if it tipped forward.  His speech was slurred and almost unintelligible except to those who knew him best.

 

He is an active mathematician and physicist, whom some have called the most brilliant since Albert Einstein. 

 

 

 

Stephen W. Hawking's well-wishers greeting the physicist  (in the  wheelchair) in 2007  at the Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility in Florida after a zero-gravity flight.

 

All matter as we normally think of it in the universe - people, air, ice, stars, gases and microbes is made up of tiny building blocks called atoms.  Atoms in turn are made up of smaller objects, called particles, and a lot of empty space. 

 

Hawking worked primarily in the field of general relativity and particularly on the physics of black holes.  In 1971 he suggested the formation, following the big bang, of numerous objects containing as much as one billion tons of mass but occupying only the space of a proton.  These objects, called mini black holes, are unique in that their immense mass and gravity require that they be ruled by the laws of relativity, while their minute size requires that the laws of quantum mechanics apply to them also.  In 1974 Hawking proposed that, in accordance with the predictions of quantum theory, black holes emit subatomic particles until they exhaust their energy and finally explode.   Hawking's work greatly spurred efforts to theoretically  delineate the properties of black holes, objects about which it was previously thought that nothing could be known.  His work was also important because it showed these properties' relationship to the laws of classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.  

 

His publications included The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1973); coauthored with G.F.R. Ellis) Superspace and Supergravity (1981), The Very Early Universe (1983), and  the best sellers A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), A Briefer History of Time (2005), and The Grand Design  (2010; coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow).

                                    Stephen W. Hawking's house in West Road, Cambridge

 

Hawking’s contributions to physics earned him many exceptional honours.  In 1974 the Royal Society elected him one of its youngest fellows. He became professor of gravitational physics at Cambridge in 1977.  Hawking was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and a Companion of Honour in 1989. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 2006 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In 2008 he accepted a visiting research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

 

Stephen W. Hawking's last words were "Be curious, Be brave, Be determined and Overcome the Odds!"

 

Stephen W. Hawking's incredible last words will shock and stun you, he said in his book    "No God.  No one directs the universe".  

 

Is it someone who spent most of his life as disabled in wheelchair  said these words OR  the genius great scholar cautioned the humanity.