Professor Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking was born January 8th 1942 in Oxford England right in the middle of World War 2. Because of this, his parents had decided to have their child away from their house in London, which was a very dangerous place to be at the time. His birth was to the day, exactly three-hundred years after the death of Galileo Galilei. Stephen hawking would become to be thought of by many as the greatest mind in the latter half of the twentieth century.
 At the age of eight his family moved to St. Albans, twenty miles north of London. At the age of eleven he attended St. Alban’s School for his primary education. He became fascinated with Mathematics, although his father would have liked to have seen him studying medicine. His uncle thought that he showed great potential, and helped to pay his tuition when he left for Oxford University when he was seventeen years old in 1959.
 While at Oxford, Hawking joined the rowing team. By his third year, he had begun to notice that he was not as well coordinated as he had once been. Not long after his twenty-first birthday, his father referred him to a doctor. After several tests on his spine and tissue samples, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) and given two years to live. The doctors could do nothing more for him but give him some vitamin pills to take, which would have had little real effect.
Hawking says that the rumors circulated by one magazine about him having drinking problems as a result of the diagnosis, but he did begin to have nightmares quite frequently. As he himself said ," My dreams at the time were rather disturbed. Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of the hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do if I were reprieved. Another dream that I had several times, was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I were going to die anyway, it might as well do some good. But I didn’t die. In fact, although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before."
 Around the time he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, he met Jane Wilde. Soon after they became engaged. They were married a few months later, and had three children together Just at the same time as Hawking had been accepted for a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
 Studying at Cambridge gave him a chance to study further into mathematics and to begin work on cosmology, there being no one to teach it at Oxford at the time. His studies were supervised by Denis Sciama, though he had apparently hoped to work under Fred Hoyle who was also teaching there at the time. He obtained hid doctorate degree in 1966 and strove to discover the link between relativity and quantum mechanics.
 In 1973 Hawking left the Institute of Astronomy. He then came to went to the Department of Applied Mathematics, where he attained the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 1979, and has help that position there since then. This post was founded in 1663 with money left by the Reverend Henry Lucas, and first held by Isaac Barrow, soon after by Isaac Newton, and later by P.A.M. Dirac; Newton and Dirac were well celebrated explores at the time. As written by Carl Sagan...
 "In the spring of 1974, about two years before the Viking spacecraft landed on Mars, I was at a meeting in England sponsored by the Royal Society of London to explore the question of how to search for extraterrestrial life. During a coffee break I noticed that a much larger meeting was being held in an adjacent hall, which out of curiosity I entered. I soon realized that I was witnessing an ancient rite, the investiture of new fellows into the Royal Society, one of the most ancient scholarly organizations on the planet. In the front row a young man in a wheelchair was, very slowly, signing his name in a book that bore on its earliest pages the signature of Isaac Newton. When at last he finished, there was a stirring ovation, Stephen Hawking was a legend even then."
 Hawking’s research and theories have led human understanding into new and exciting realms that very few people can even grasp or visualize. Now an astrophysicist, he has researched a broad range of topics and written several books including; "A Brief History of Time", published in 1985, and "Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays".
 By combining general relativity theory and quantum mechanics he has made some amazing discoveries. Miniature blackholes, the size of a large mountain, are very possible if they formed at the creation, or new cycle, of the universe. galactic-core-sized ones may lie at the center of other galaxies, which would help to explain radio galaxies and quasars. In addition, it has been shown that a blackhole may exist so long as it radiates radiation (called Hawking’s Radiation) from either end of its axis. Along with blackholes, Hawking has also described wormholes, fluctuations in space time that would be the equivalent of glancing alpha centauri adrift outside your bedroom window. These could allow shortcuts for travelling spacecraft if found. According to him however, within a blackhole are singularities which make traditional laws of physics obsolete, thereby making study of them quite difficult.
 Stephen Hawking has also made many lectures, though his tracheostromy surgery after catching pneumonia in 1985. He was not able to speak for a while, until provided soon thereafter with a speech synthesizer and personal computer attached to his wheelchair, and he still did not allow the disease to hinder his research. As he put it...
 "I am quite often asked: How do you feel about having ALS. The answer is, not a lot. I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the thing it prevents me from doing, which are not that many"
"The realization that I had an incurable disease, that it was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock. How could something like this happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this? However, while I had been in the hospital, I had seen a boy I vaguely knew die of leukemia, in the bed opposite me. It had not bee a pretty sight. Clearly there were people who were worse off than me. At least my condition didn’t make me feel sick. Whenever I feel inclined to feel sorry for myself, I remember that boy."
 In 1982, Stephen Hawking was awarded the CBE. Later in 1989 he was Companion of Honor. He also currently is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
 Hawking has continued to give lectures all over the world. In one such lecture he began interestingly by stating, "In this talk, I would like to speculate a little, on the development of life in the universe, and in particular, the development of intelligent life. I shall take this to include the human race, even though much of its behavior throughout history, has been pretty stupid, and not calculated to aid the survival of the species." Similar to the philosophy of the novel "Ishmael".
 In his book "A Brief History of Time", Stephen Hawking made clear his view of human understanding currently, in the future, and perhaps where the line might be drawn at our ability to understand anything further: the limits of the human imagination...
 "Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better? What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before  then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun-or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be will tell."
 "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?"

Bibliography...
1. "The New York Public Library "Science Desk Reference"", copyright 1995 by The Stonesong Press Inc. and the New York Public Library.
2. Cori-Heisenberg, "Bibliographical Encyclopedia of Scientists", Volume 2, copy right 1998 by Marshall Canondish Corporation, New York.
3. "The 1995 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia", copyright 1995 by Grolier Electronic Publishing.
4. Stephen W. Hawking (introduction by Carl Sagan), "A Brief History of Time", Copyright 1988 by Stephen W. Hawking.
5. "Professor Stephen Hawking’s Homepage", <http://www.hawking.org.uk/text/about/about.html>.