Stephen J. Hawking By Rachel Finck :: essays research papers

Stephen J. hawk by Rachel FinckStephen Hawking was born in January of 1942 in Oxford, England. He grewup 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. StephenHawking is a brilliant and highly productive researcher, and, since 1979, he hasheld the Lucasian professorship in mathematics at Cambridge, the very chair onceheld by Isaac Newton. Although still relatively young, Hawking is already beingcompared to such great intellects as Newton and Albert Einstein. Yet it shouldbe noted that since the early 1960s he has been the victim of a progressive andincurable motorneurone disease, ALS, that now confines him to a wheelchair.This affliction prevents Hawking from reading, writing, or calculating in adirect 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 enhancedhis career by giving him the freedom to think about physics and the Universe.Stephen Hawking has written many essays involving the coordinated supposition,which is a theory summarizing the entire of the forcible world a theory thatwould stand as a complete, consistent theory of the physical interactions thatwould describe alone possible observations. Our attempts at modeling physicalreality normally consists of two parts a) A set of local laws that are obeyedby the various physical quantities, formulated in terms of differentialequations, and b) Sets of boundary conditions that tell us the state of someregions of the universe at a certain time and what effect propagate into itsubsequently from the rest of the universe. Presently, physicist are stilltrying to unify two separate theories to describe everything in the universe.The two theories are the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.Albert Einstein formulated the general th eory of relativity almostsingle-handedly in 1915. First, in 1905, he developed the special theory ofrelativity, which deals with the impression of people measuring different timeintervals, while moving at different speeds, yet measuring the same speed forthe speed of light, regardless of velocity. In 1915, he developed the generaltheory of relativity. This theory dealt with the concept of gravity as adistortion of space-time, and not just a force at heart it.Einsteins original equations predicted that the universe was eitherexpanding or contracting. Einsteins equations showed that mass and energy arealways positive, which is why gravity always attracts bodies toward each other.