The Guardian’s Science correspondent Alok Jha has written a piece on the occasion of the 70th birthday celebration of scientist Stephen Hawking reporting:
- “The world’s most famous living scientists turns 70 today. Professor Stephen Hawking has defied medical expectations, since being diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and given only a few years to live, to become one of the most accomplished physicists in the fields of black holes and the study of the early universe”.
Part of the birthday celebrations apparently involve a three-day scientific seminar in Cambridge, on The State of the Universe at which Hawkins will speak on the final day, Sunday [today].
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UPDATE: The Washington Post later reported that Hawking was not well enough, following a recent hospitalization, to attend the celebration in person, but he did deliver an address via videotape on Sunday, and “…in a recorded message played to attendees he repeated his call for humans to colonize other worlds. University of Cambridge Vice Chancellor Leszek Borysiewicz told the conference that Hawking, who is almost completely paralyzed because of Lou Gehrig’s disease, had only recently been discharged from the hospital for an unspecified ailment … In his recorded speech, Hawking pleaded for interplanetary travel, arguing that humans faced a grim future unless they spread out from their terrestrial home. ‘I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet’, he said…”
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The WPost article continued: ” Hawking’s speech — delivered in his distinctive, robotic monotone — charmed the audience of scientists, students and journalists gathered at Cambridge’s Lady Mitchell Hall … A black hole expert, Hawking is one of the leading lights in theoretical astrophysics. His achievements are all the more remarkable because of his Lou Gehrig’s disease, an incurable degenerative disorder with which he was diagnosed as a 21-year-old. Most people die within a few years of the diagnosis, but Hawking has defied the odds and spent half a century carrying out pioneering research. He owes much of his fame to his best-selling series of works popularizing the latest developments in theoretical astrophysics. ‘A Brief History of Time’, published in 1988, has alone has sold millions of copies. A host of other books, including ‘A Briefer History of Time’, have followed. Nevertheless the condition — known as motor neurone disease in the U.K — has made life difficult. Since catching pneumonia in 1985, he has needed around-the-clock care. Hawking relies on a computerized wheelchair to move around and a voice synthesizer to speak”.
The Guardian’s piece also reported that
- “Kitty Ferguson, author of Stephen Hawking: His life and Work, said that the physicist is celebrated by his colleagues for always running ahead of the pack … [and] the way Hawking had dealt with his disability was one of the most compelling facets of his personality and willpower. ‘The fact that he is able to live with his disability and it’s just the most astounding, good-humoured, dismissal of it. It’s not as though he’s triumphing over it, it’s just as though it’s not there’.”
The Guardian also notes that:
- “Professor Kip Thorne, formerly of the California Institute of Technology and a longtime collaborator of Hawking … paid tribute to Hawking’s ability to work with cosmology in a novel way: ‘When Stephen lost the use of his hands and could no longer manipulate equations on paper, he compensated by training himself to manipulate complex shapes and topologies in his mind at great speed. That ability has enabled him to see the solutions to deep physics problems that nobody else could solve, and that he probably would not have been able to solve, himself, without his newfound skill’.”
This report is posted here.