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DAY 3
Hawking was born in England in 1942. After university he
began research in cosmology. At age 21, he learned he had
Lou Gehrig’s disease. Soon Hawking couldn’t move or speak.
However, he went on to make new discoveries about time and
the universe and became famous for his work.
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Stephen Hawking: A Legendary Scientist and Man 161
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His goal, he said, is “to understand why the universe is
as it is and why it exists in the first place.” While no
scientist has done that yet, Hawking has always thought
big. Another goal is to travel into space. He got a little
closer to that desire when he visited the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida at the age of 65. He was able to
experience an environment without gravity. Freed from
his wheelchair, he floated in the cabin of a jet airplane
speeding over the Atlantic.
Hawking even appeared in several movies and in a
television episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Just
as he’s done all his life, he is serious about science, but he
also knows how to have fun.
By his seventieth birthday in 2012, Hawking had lost all
control over his body and was too weak to attend a
meeting held in his honor. But in a speech written for the
occasion, he said the last few decades were “a glorious
time to be alive” and doing research. “Our picture of the
universe has changed a great deal in the last forty years,
and I am happy to have made a small contribution.”