Renowned British Physicist Stephen Hawking Dies at 76

London, MINA – Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died early Wednesday at the age of 76, his family said in a statement, adding that the professor died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Cambridge, reported the Deutsche Presse-Agentur, DPA.

In 2017, Hawking, who at 21 was diagnosed with incurable motor neurone disease which left him in a wheelchair and needing to use a computer voice to communicate, told the BBC he never expected to reach 75.

Hawking achieved worldwide fame after his book A Brief History of Time was published in 1988, selling more than 10 million copies.

Born into an intellectual family on 8th January, 1942, Hawking won a scholarship to Oxford University in 1959, and three years later switched to rival Cambridge to conduct research on cosmology.

At the unusually young age of 32, Hawking was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious academic institution. In 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University – the same post once held by Isaac Newton.

He became one of the world’s greatest experts on gravity and black holes – places where matter is compressed to the point where the normal laws of space and time break down, DPA added. (T/RS5/RS1)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)