That thought-controlled wheelchair fitted with the best of display and thought-recognition technologies in the world has just lost its famous occupant. Its state-of-the-art speech synthesiser will no longer be able to convert thoughts emanating from one of the brightest minds into words that were soaked up by millions — those with a scientific bend of mind and also those without.

The passing of Stephen Hawking this week in Cambridge has created a void in the universe of knowledge. More importantly, with it, science has lost one of its most powerful voices, ironically produced by vocal chords feebled by a deadly degenerative motor neurone disease that afflicted Hawking more than half-a-century ago.

Groundbreaking work on black holes, initially under Nobel prize-winning Roger Penrose, and on his own subsequently, won Hawking laurels as one of the greatest cosmologists of recent times. What made him popular among the masses, however, are his extremely readable science books, including A Brief History of Time , which reportedly sold over 10 million copies. In 2014, his life — particularly the early years of his struggle battling an incurable illness — was immortalised by the film The Theory of Everything , which went on to win an Oscar. Despite his infirmity and inability to speak properly, Hawking was a crowd-puller with his popular lectures. The celebrity scientist that he was, Hawking enjoyed appearing on television.

The celebrity status did not deter him from publicly airing his views, however unpalatable to the powers that be. He refused to accept knighthood in the late ’90s because he felt that the government wasn’t spending enough on science. Critical of Brexit, Hawking, at an awards function in 2016, told British Prime Minister Theresa May (who praised him for being “a man who has quite simply changed the way we look at the world”): “I deal with tough mathematical questions every day, but please don’t ask to help with Brexit.”

Born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, Hawking graduated from Oxford and subsequently in 1962 moved to Cambridge, which remained his base till the end. At Cambridge, Hawking held one of the most distinguished positions — the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, once held by Sir Isaac Newton — for four decades till his retirement in 2009. He continued to be the director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge till his last day.

One of Hawking’s major contributions to human knowledge was linking gravity and quantum theory. He predicted that black holes would not be completely black, as classical general relativity implies, but they would emit radiation, thus indicating a deep connection between gravity and thermodynamics.

However, there is an interesting trivia around this work on black hole radiation. Hawking originally stated that the radiation emerging from a black hole was random and therefore contained no useful information about its contents.

This led to an interesting wager in 1997 between Hawking and Kip Thorne of California Institute of Technology (who won a Nobel for physics last year) on the one hand and Thorne’s colleague John Preskill on the other. Hawking’s view was that information could not escape, while Preskill insisted otherwise. In 2004, however, Hawking conceded that he was wrong and paid up, offering Preskill an encyclopedia of baseball in accordance with the terms of the original bet.

As remarked by the President of Royal Society and India-born Nobel laureate Venki Ramakrishnan, in a tribute: “Stephen Hawking overcame unimaginable challenges to become one of the most influential and renowned scientists of our time. His life is a testament to the power of human creativity and imagination.” Incidentally, Hawking was one of the youngest scientists to be elected as Royal Society Fellow in 1974, at 32.

In his tribute to Hawking, UK’s Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, who was the former’s junior at Cambridge by a couple of years, said that Hawking’s name will live on in the annals of science. “Stephen was far from being the archetype unworldly or nerdish scientist — his personality remained amazingly unwarped by his frustrations and handicaps... he enjoyed trips to theatre or opera. He had robust common sense, and was ready to express forceful political opinions.”

In his lifetime, Hawking had won innumerable awards, including the 2013 Breakthrough Prize, worth $3 million. However, one prize that would have dimmed its lustre by not going his way would be Nobel Prize. Hawking has joined the pantheon of luminaries like Mahatma Gandhi and James Joyce who were not awarded the Nobel Prize despite their contributions.

This is understandable because the Nobel is awarded only when theoretical work is backed up with experimental evidence. Hawking’s works are yet to be proven experimentally, said Sunil Mukhi, a professor of theoretical physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune. Even if his theories are proven in future, Hawking’s name will never get linked with the Nobel — a prize that is given posthumously only when a person is nominated before February 1 of the same year.

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