the british physicist stephen hawking is a unique human model in human history and although the saying goes like this ‘the right mind in the right body’, somehow this is not applicable to hawkins.
colleague mohammed al-hashemi says that (isaac) newton and (albert) einstein were among the most prominent physicists, mathematicians and are responsible for the modern scientific revolution. they were also mentally and physically fit until the last moments of their lives.
newton published the third edition of his book ‘the mathematical origins of natural philosophy’ on most of the principles of classical mechanics and gravity in 1726, a few months before his death. einstein was studying and modeling physical equations in 1955 although he was sick and lay in bed.
hawking made most of his research and discoveries on the physics of the universe and the ‘black hole’, while he was fully paralyzed, did not move or could speak when he was solving and devising the equations mentally which in itself is an amazing feat beyond natural human mind.
in 1963, hawking suffered from motor neuromuscular disease which affected the cells that control the movement of voluntary muscles in the brain and in the spinal cord that made him unable to move by time.
doctors predicted he would not live for more than two years. he then had pneumonia that affected his neck that made him unable to speak. he did not respond to the doctors’ proposals to end his life, while he was writing his famous book ‘a brief history of time: from the big bang to black holes’, which made him more reputable in the world, and the book was later translated into several languages, including arabic.
hawking received his doctorate in theoretical physics and applied mathematics in 1966, when he was 24 years old, specializing in general relativity and cosmology. his thesis won him the adams prize, one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics, awarded annually by the university of cambridge. the thesis was about the geometric description of time and space in large black holes.
over time, hawking became completely paralyzed in the upper and lower limbs and lost the ability to use his fingers to type the words, and thus lost his link from the keyboard to the screen, therefore science developed a system for him called assistive context-aware toolkit (acat), which moves the cursor automatically on the letters arranged vertically and horizontally on the computer screen.
with the help of this system, hawking could stop the cursor on the selected character by moving the cheek muscle, which in turn affects the key installed in the frame of his infrared eye glasses (lens), captures the movement of the cheek muscle by infrared and stops the cursor on the selected character on the keyboard on the screen.
the words and sentences are converted into speech, but the problem with this technique is the slow typing of words, this method enabled him to communicate with a word or two only a minute, and became a little faster.
hawking proved that the black holes emit radiation against all the theories at the time. this radiation is called after his name, and the first attempt to connect the physics of great objects, such as earth, sun and galaxies, to quantum physics applied to nano particles as the nucleus of atoms, electrons and protons, an achievement that einstein failed to realize for over 30 years.
hawking reportedly said: i want to continue to live, not for the purpose of living itself, but for the most scientific achievements, writings and lectures, and to be a source of hope and inspiration for the disabled around the world. he says there are 100 billion galaxies in the universe, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. earth is unlikely to be the only place where life has evolved. he also believes that the sun will lose its energy after 10 million years and declared this will be the end of life on earth.
he wrote a large number of scientific books with his theories, and published hundreds of scientific papers, yet there are few scholars who can question his theories or question him as one of the greatest theoretical physicists after the genius scientist albert einstein. he did all that, so what did we do? we just called him an infidel, an atheist and an apostate.