Back to: Maharashtra Board Class 10th English Guide & Notes
Table of Contents
Introduction
The lesson “Stephen Hawking” is all about the struggles, achievements, and hardships which, the great scientist, Stephen Hawking, faced in his life. Over the years, Stephen Hawking had written a total of fifteen books. The Grand Design, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Theory of Everything are a few of his most noteworthy works.
His Three Famous Books
In the year 1988, Stephen launched his publication “A Brief History of Time”, which became an account of cosmology for the masses and offered an overview of space and time, the existence of God, and the future. This book was translated into more than forty languages. Stephen Hawking then followed up his book with “The Universe in a Nutshell” which had a more detailed approach towards cosmology’s big theories.
Hawking’s other book “A Briefer History of Time” further simplified the original work’s basic concepts and touched upon the newest developments in the field like String theory. All these three books together along with Hawking’s own research and papers, articulate the physicist’s personal search for Science’s Holy Grail, a single unifying theory to explain how the universe began.
Hawking claimed that he could think in eleven dimensions to lay out some major possibilities for humankind. It was September 2010, when Hawking spoke against God’s existence and his creation of the Universe in his book “The Grand Design” Hawking even claimed that “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing”
The Grand Design was Hawking’s first major publication in almost a decade. Within his new work, he set out to challenge Sir Isaac Newton’s belief in the fact that the universe had to have been designed by God, simply because it could not have been born from Chaos.
Hawkings Rejected God
Hawking on the other hand totally rejected the idea of God and his contribution in the ongoing process of the World. He said, “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going”. At the young age of twenty-one, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). This was such a serious health issue in which Hawking’s nerves were shutting down. Though he tried his best to ignore his symptoms and problems, which he was continuously facing while giving a speech or even just standing, it was noticed by his father.
He was treated and underwent a series of tests. Doctors used to take muscle samples from his arm, stuck electrodes into him injected some radio-opaque fluid into his spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays as they tilted the bed.
Before getting released from the hospital, Hawking had a dream that he was going to be executed. He said that his dream made him realize that there were still things to do with his life. Hawking poured himself into the works and research.
As physical control over his body diminished, the effects of his disease started to slow down. His ever-expanding career was accompanied by an ever-worsening physical state. He could feed himself and go out of bed. By the mid-1970s, the Hawking family had taken in one of Hawking’s graduate students to help in managing Hawking’s care and work.
He Lost his Voive
Unfortunately, Hawking lost his voice in 1985. However, the unpleasant situation caught the attention of a California Computer Programmer, who had developed a speaking program that could be directed by head or eye movement. This invention allowed Hawking to select words on a computer screen that were then passed through a speech synthesizer.
Through the program and the help of assistants, Stephen Hawking continued to write at a prolific rate. Due to a chest infection, he failed to appear at a conference in Arizona in the year 2009. In April, he was rushed to the hospital for being what University officials described as “Gravely Ill”. Unfortunately, he passed away on the 14th of March 2018.
