STEPHEN J. HAWKING

Essay by Rachel FinckHigh School, 10th gradeA+, March 1997

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Stephen Hawking Science Project. The conclusion didn't fit. Also, I'm not really sure what his middle name is.

Stephen J. Hawking

by Rachel Finck

Stephen Hawking was born in January of 1942 in Oxford, England. He

grew up near London and was educated at Oxford, from which he received his

BA in 1962, and Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in theoretical

physics. Stephen Hawking is a brilliant and highly productive researcher, and,

since 1979, he has held the Lucasian professorship in mathematics at

Cambridge, the very chair once held by Isaac Newton. Although still relatively

young, Hawking is already being compared to such great intellects as Newton

and Albert Einstein. Yet it should be noted that since the early 1960s he has been

the victim of a progressive and incurable motorneurone disease, ALS, that now

confines him to a wheelchair. This affliction prevents Hawking from reading,

writing, or calculating in a direct and simple way.

The bulk of his work, involving

studying, publishing, lecturing, and worldwide travel, is carried on with the help of

colleagues, friends, and his wife. Of his illness, Hawking has said that it has

enhanced his career by giving him the freedom to think about physics and the

Universe.

Stephen Hawking has written many essays involving the unified theory,

which is a theory summarizing the entire of the physical world; a theory that would

stand as a complete, consistent theory of the physical interactions that would

describe all possible observations. Our attempts at modeling physical reality

normally consists of two parts: a) A set of local laws that are obeyed by the

various physical quantities, formulated in terms of differential equations, and b)

Sets of boundary conditions that tell us the state of some regions of the universe

at a certain time and what...