Stephen J. Hawking By Rachel Finck :: essays research papers

Stephen J. Hawking by Rachel Finck   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Stephen Hawking was born in January of 1942 in Oxford, England. He grew up near London and was educated at Oxford, from which he received his BA in 1962, and Cambridge, where he received his doctorate in theoretical physics. Stephen Hawking is a brilliant and highly productive researcher, and, since 1979, he has held the Lucasian professorship in mathematics at Cambridge, the very chair once held by Isaac Newton. Although still relatively young, Hawking is already being compared to such great intellects as Newton and Albert Einstein. Yet it should be noted that since the early 1960s he has been the victim of a progressive and incurable motorneurone disease, ALS, that now confines him to a wheelchair. This affliction prevents Hawking from reading, writing, or calculating in a direct and simple way. The bulk of his work, involving studying, publishing, lecturing, and worldwide travel, is carried on with the help of colleagues, friends, and his wife. Of his illness, Hawking has said that it has enhanced his career by giving him the freedom to think about physics and the Universe.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Stephen Hawking has written many essays involving the unified theory, which is a theory summarizing the entire of the physical world; a theory that would stand as a complete, consistent theory of the physical interactions that would describe all possible observations. Our attempts at modeling physical reality normally consists of two parts: a) A set of local laws that are obeyed by the various physical quantities, formulated in terms of differential equations, and b) Sets of boundary conditions that tell us the state of some regions of the universe at a certain time and what effects propagate into it subsequently from the rest of the universe. Presently, physicist are still trying to unify two separate theories to describe everything in the universe. The two theories are the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Albert Einstein formulated the general theory of relativity almost single-handedly in 1915. First, in 1905, he developed the special theory of relativity, which deals with the concept of people measuring different time intervals, while moving at different speeds, yet measuring the same speed for the speed of light, regardless of velocity. In 1915, he developed the general theory of relativity. This theory dealt with the concept of gravity as a distortion of space-time, and not just a force within it.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Einstein's original equations predicted that the universe was either expanding or contracting. Einstein's equations showed that mass and energy are always positive, which is why gravity always attracts bodies toward each other.