Legendary cosmologist Stephen Hawking had been to India twice, the last time being in 2001, to give a special lecture at an international conference on String Theory – a theoretical framework that could string together all known particles and theories known so far.
“During that trip, Hawking spent 10 days giving many of us an opportunity to discuss ‘physics’ with him,” said Sunil Mukhi, currently professor and chair of physics at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research at Pune. Mukhi, one of the coordinators of the Strings 2001 conference, was then at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, which hosted the event.
“Hawking immensely contributed to the study of gravitation with an emphasis on black holes and cosmology. He made a series of revolutionary contributions as well as smaller ones which are also equally important. His thinking was really new, impacting our understanding of gravity to this day,” said Mukhi, who specialises in the study of string theory and quantum field theory. Hawking’s first visit to India was in 1959, around the time that he entered the University College, Oxford, for a degree in natural science.
During his 2001 visit, the wheelchair-bound Hawking paid a visit to historic monuments, including Jantar Mantar and Qutab Minar, and called on the then President KR Narayanan at Rashtrapati Bhavan, telling him: “Indians are so good at mathematics and physics.”
Somak Raychaudhury, Director of the Pune-based Inter University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics, who was a research student at the University of Cambridge, where Hawking spent over five decades, said: “The man in the street knows Hawking’s name not because of his research on black holes. He knows him because he was a brain in a bottle.”
“He could hardly move, and yet in spite of being given two years to live at the age of 20, he lived till 76 and tackled every obstacle in life head on,” Raychaudhury, who obtained a PhD in astrophysics from Cambridge in 1990, told a news agency.