Stephen Hawking
Many people think of science as a collection of facts and ideas about the world around us. But science is more than of how human beings have brought their individual strengths and weaknesses to the ever going struggle to learn more about our world. Stephen Hawking is one of the best-known and most admired scientists in the world today. His life and work have been featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, television documentaries, and even a movie. Part of Hawking's fame comes from his ability to use his imagination or intuition to see connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. He has combined the physical laws governing suns and galaxies with those governing the particles inside the atom. He has created a chain of thought that links events inside collapsing stars with the almost unimaginable explosion that, most scientists believe, began our universe about fifteen billion years ago (Boslough). In early 1942, Great Britain was in the third year of a bitter struggle for survival. England had been spared from invasion, but night after night, German bombers continued to pound London. Frank and Isobel Hawking were expecting their first child. The Hawkings were well-educated and talented. Both had atte
Hawking decided to call his book A Brief History of Time. In it Hawking describes how scientists have, step by step, uncovered the secrets of the universe and of the atoms from which all matter is made. The result is challenging reading, but Hawking had taken the advice about not having sums in his book: the only equation that appears is Einstein's classic E=mc^2. Instead of equations, Hawking relies on analogies and diagrams to show relationships and movement in space and time (Gribbin). Robert was followed by a daughter, Lucy, in 1970, and another son, Timothy, in 1979 (Boslough). "The best explanation for this phenomenon is that matter has been blown off the surface of the visible star. As it falls toward the unseen companion, it develops a spiral motion (rather like water running out of a bath), and it gets very hot, emitting X-rays. For this mechanism to work, the unseen object has to be very small, like a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. From the observed orbit of the visible star, one can determine the lowest possible mass of the unseen object. In the case of Cygnus X-1 [a likely candidate for a black hole is this star system], this is about six times the mass of the sun, which according to Chandrasekhar's result, is too great... to be a white dwarf. It is also too large a mass to be a neutron star. It seems, therefore, that it must be a black hole..." (Hawking) As a result the surface would be immense-- so powerful, in fact, that anything that entered the black hole would be trapped inside, and nothing, not even light, could ever come out. Put another was a black hole would bend space so completely around itself that it would, in effect, disappear into a private universe of its own (Susskind). In his book A Brief History of Time, Hawking gives his opinion of black holes. The popularity of A Brief History of Time encouraged Bantam Books in 1993 to publish a collection of Hawking's earlier writings-- essays, talks, and interviews-- with the title Black Holes and Baby Universes. While A Brief History of Time focused on scientific matters, the new book includes autobiography and even a discussion of Hawking's favorite music in addition to the exploration of scientific questions (Wagner).
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Approximate Word count = 2694
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page double spaced)
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