by:Henry Verá Rivas
He was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford (Great Britain).
He was the eldest of four brothers in a family of intellectuals; His father, Frank Hawking, was an expert in tropical disease research, a professor at the University College of Oxford, and his mother, Isobel, studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
The marriage met shortly after the outbreak of World War II at a medical research institute where she worked as a secretary and he as a medical researcher. They lived in Highgate, but as London was under air raid, Isobel moved to Oxford to give birth. Hawking has two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adoptive brother, Edward.
In 1950, when his father became head of the parasitology division at the National Institute of Medical Research, his family moved to St. Albans, Hertfordshire. The family often ate in silence while the diners engaged in reading. He lived frugally in a large house, disorderly and poorly maintained. During one of her father's frequent absences from Africa, for work reasons, the family spent four months in Mallorca visiting a friend of her mother and her husband, the poet Robert Graves.
He was a mediocre student in high school, in 1959 he came to the University and graduated with a poor record. A scholarship allowed him to carry out post-graduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where he specialized in Theoretical Physics and Cosmology. He made a trip to the Middle East and was diagnosed with a neuronal disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's disease. The disease causes a gradual destruction of the cells of the central nervous system in charge of regulating the voluntary muscular activity, which causes that the patient loses its locomotor functions. However, the brain remains lucid. The doctors diagnosed him about two years of life and collapsed; Left his job and suffered a serious depressive crisis.
As time passed and he saw that the disease was stabilizing, he recovered morale and, in a wheelchair, began his thesis under the direction of Professor Sciama. After doctoring, he worked with theoretical physicist Roger Penrose on the mathematical check of the beginning of time. At the same time he was appointed adjunct professor of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge.
His theories about the uniqueness of the universe, the big bang or original explosion of the cosmos, and black holes, revolutionized 20th century physics by opening up new horizons to research. He argues that general relativity supports the theory that the creation of the universe originated from a Big Bang, arising from a singularity or an infinite point of distortion of space and time. Later he debugged this concept considering all these theories as secondary attempts to describe a reality, in which concepts such as singularity have no meaning and where space and time form a closed surface without boundaries.
He was the head of the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge until his retirement in 2009.
He wrote History of Time: from Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). In 1989 he was awarded in Spain with the Prince of Asturias Award of Concord. He was awarded the Copley Medal in 2006 and the Medal of Freedom in 2009.
When Hawking was a student of Cambridge, it maintained relations with Jane Wilde, a friend of its sister, whom it knew shortly before being diagnosed of its illness. They married on July 14, 1965. During their first marriage years, they lived in London because of the studies of their wife, who traveled to the United States several times to attend conferences. Jane gave a Ph.D. program, and had her son, Robert, in 1967. Her daughter, Lucy, was born in 1970, and Timothy, in April 1979. After twenty-five years of marriage, they separated. In 1990, Hawking went to live with his nurse. Since the late 1980s she has interacted with Elaine Mason to dismay colleagues and family because of her strong character and protective attitude. After his divorce in the spring of 1995, Hawking married Mason in September of the same year. In 2006 Hawking and Elaine divorced, after which he resumed relations with Jane, her children and grandchildren.
In September 2014, Hawking declared himself an atheist.
