Science’s star Stephen Hawking 78th Birthday celebrations

LONDON: Legendary cosmologist and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s 78 birthday is celebrated across the globe today on Wednesday.

Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942. His birthday was also Galileo’s 300th death anniversary, long a source of pride for the well-known scientist.

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Stephen Hawking was a British physicist, theorist and author who carried out groundbreaking work in physics and cosmology, and whose works helped to make knowledge accessible to everyone.

 Hawking was a scientist who got recognization by his book ‘A brief history of time’ for his research on black holes and relativity, and the author of other popular science books.

He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the University of Cambridge at the age of 21. In the 2014 film ‘The Theory of Everything’, part of his life story was depicted.

In 1974, Hawking’s research transformed him into a celebrity in the scientific world when he showed that black holes are not the vacuum of information that scientists believed they were.

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Hawking made an important move into space travel in 2007, at the age of 65. When visiting Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, he was given a chance to explore a gravity-free environment.