British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. Hawking was a fellow of the
Royal Society (FRS), a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of
the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2002,
Hawking was ranked number 25 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
His scientific works
included a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework
of general relativity and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called
Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of
the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He was a vigorous supporter of the many-
worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In 2007, Hawking and his daughter Lucy published
George's Secret Key to
the Universe, a children's book designed to explain theoretical physics in an
accessible fashion and featuring characters similar to those in the Hawking family. The book was
followed by sequels in 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2016. In 2002, following a UK-wide vote,
the BBC
included Hawking in their list of the 100 Greatest Britons. He was awarded the Copley Medal from
the Royal Society (2006), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is America's highest civilian
honour (2009), and the Russian Special Fundamental Physics Prize (2013).Several buildings have
been
named after him, including the Stephen W. Hawking Science Museum in San Salvador, El
Salvador, the Stephen Hawking Building in Cambridge, and the Stephen Hawking Centre at the
Perimeter Institute in Canada. Appropriately, given Hawking's association with time, he unveiled
the mechanical "Chronophage" (or time-eating) Corpus Clock
at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge in September 2008.During his career, Hawking supervised 39 successful PhD students.
One doctoral student did not successfully complete the PhD. As required by Cambridge University
regulations, Hawking retired as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics in 2009. Despite suggestions
that he might leave the United Kingdom as a protest against public funding
cuts to basic scientific
research, Hawking worked as director of research at the Cambridge University Department of
Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.On 28 June 2009, as a tongue-in-cheek test of his
1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible, Hawking held a party open to all,
complete with hors d'oeuvres and iced champagne, but publicised the party only after it was over so
that only time-travellers would
know to attend; as expected, nobody showed up to the party.On 20
July 2015, Hawking helped launch Breakthrough Initiatives, an effort to search for extraterrestrial
life. Hawking created Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth, a documentary on space
colonisation, as a 2017 episode of Tomorrow's World.
Hawking had a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease (also known as
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis "ALS" or Lou Gehrig's disease) that gradually
paralysed him over the
decades. Even after the loss of his speech, he was still able to communicate through a speech-
generating device, initially through use of a hand-held switch, and eventually by using a single
cheek muscle. He died on 14 March 2018 at the age of 76.
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