Stephen William Hawking, the
Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair + , pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
"Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world," Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview. Coincidentally, Einstein was born on March 14 (in 1879), the date on which Hawking died. Equally remarkably, Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 - exactly 300 years after the death of another great scientist,
Galileo Galilei.
Hawking's book "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes," published in 1988, sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, "The Theory of Everything," was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.
Scientifically, Hawking will be best remembered + for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.
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