One Smart Monkey
It’s the birthday of physicist Stephen Hawking, born in Oxford, England (1942). He went to Oxford University but never attended lectures. He was bored with most of his classes because they seemed too easy and it was only after an oral exam that his professors realized how smart he was. He had went on to get a Ph.D. and he was just starting to find his courses interesting when he was diagnosed with ALS, a disease that slowly destroys a persons ability to move any part of their body, while leaving the brain itself unharmed. His doctors gave him a life expectancy of two to three years.
…just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star…
At first Hawking was utterly depressed and considered giving up on everything. But then his condition seemed to stabilize and he got engaged to one of his classmates. He said, “[I realized that] if we were to get married, I had to get a job. And to get a job, I had to finish my Ph.D. I started working hard for the first time in my life. To my surprise, I found I liked it.”
Hawking decided to focus his studies on the mysterious astronomical objects known as black holes and he developed new theories about how they function and what role they may have played in the origin of the universe.
In 1988, Hawking decided to sum up all the research on physics and astronomy in a book for nonscientists called A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). His publishers told him that in order for the book to be successful he had to avoid math altogether. They estimated that he would reduce his readership by fifty percent for every mathematical equation he included. So he included only one: E=MC2. A Brief History of Time went on to sell almost 10 million copies.
Stephen Hawking said, “[Human beings] are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
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