स्टिफन विलियम हकिङ
Introduction
Stephen William Hawking (स्टिफन विलियम हकिङ) is a biography (जीवनी) chapter in the Class 12 Nepali course. It tells the inspiring life story of the great British physicist who, though almost completely paralyzed by disease, unlocked new truths about the universe and astonished the whole world with his willpower, talent and dedication.
Summary
Stephen Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, Britain, into a middle-class family struggling through the hardships of the Second World War. He was the first child of his mother Isabel, a scholar of economics, and his father Frank, a scholar of biology. His schooling began at Byron House in Highgate, London, and was completed at St Albans school: where, surprisingly, he was counted among the weaker students of his class.
At only twenty-one, while studying at Cambridge, Hawking was struck by a nerve disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), in which the body's organs gradually stop working. Doctors gave him only about two years to live. Yet in 1966, unable even to walk, he completed his PhD from Cambridge. He went on to win a fellowship there, joined the Institute of Astronomy in 1968, and in 1979 was appointed to Cambridge's famous Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics. By then he could not move without a wheelchair, and after a windpipe operation in 1985 he lost his voice completely. A special computer, operated through his brain waves and facial expressions, became his voice: through it he published research, delivered lectures and gave interviews. In 1965 he married Jane Wilde, with whom he had a daughter, Lucy, and two sons, Robert and Timothy; they divorced in 1990, and his second marriage to his nurse Elaine Mason also ended in 2006.
Hawking wrote more than a dozen books and many research papers. His most celebrated book, A Brief History of Time (1988), was declared an all-time best-seller by the Guinness Book of World Records. His original contribution concerned the origin and structure of the universe: he argued that the universe began from a point of maximum density and would end in such a point, the black hole, and discovered that things compressed inside a black hole by its immense gravity emit radiation. He received honours including the Albert Einstein Medal (1979), the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society (1976), the Commander of the British Empire (1982) and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). He repeatedly warned humanity about nuclear war, global warming and uncontrolled artificial intelligence, and advised children to look always at the stars and not down at their feet, to stay busy in work, to accept love, and never to regard disability as misfortune. After a lifetime of struggle, he died on 14 March 2018 at the age of seventy-six.
Theme
The biography shows that a person who is physically weak but rich in willpower, knowledge and action, Hawking's three great powers, is never truly powerless. Mistakes are guides on the path of progress, disability is not destiny, and a life devoted to human welfare becomes an example for the whole world.