Stephen Hawking, best known for his best-selling science books A Brief History of Time, and The Selfish Gene, was born in 1942 in Oxford, meaning he both went to, and came from Oxford, which suggests that he didn't really go anywhere.
As a child, the Hawking family moved to St Albans, where eight-year-old Stephen attended St Albans High School for Girls, which must have been a bit confusing.
He also later attended Radlett School, where he learned to scrape hot cheese into a delicious sandwich.
Although known at school as "Einstein", Hawking was not initially successful academically. But then again, neither was Einstein, so perhaps it was a clever nickname after all.
Things really began to kick off when Hawking began his university education studying mathematics and the use of redundant words at University College, Oxford University, Oxford. Although initially he was bored and lonely – finding the work "ridiculously easy", the poor petal, in his second and third year he developed into a popular college member, interested in classical music and science fiction, the daft nerd.
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| Hawking's attempts to shatter the nerd stereotype were not as successful as hoped |
Hawking received a first-class degree in natural science and toddled off to Cambridge to study Cosmology and other well-known women's magazines.
It was around this time that Hawking was diagnosed, shortly after his 21st birthday as suffering from motor neurone disease, which might have discouraged a lesser soul.
Not Hawking though, who went on to complete his thesis on the topic of The Entire Universe.
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| Stephen Hawking as Newt Scamander in the film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them |
From 1973, Hawking moved into the study of quantum gravity and quantum mechanics, which are like regular gravity and mechanics, except they don't make any sense. And it was around this time he took part in The Black Hole War, a conflict featuring substantially fewer lasers and more academic bickering than you might hope.
This was all part of Hawking's move into the even-bigger question of 'what's it all about eh?' as famously also posed by Alfie.
Hawking was keen to discover a grand unified theory of the universe, declaring, "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we should know the mind of God." This, of course, included the risk the we came to know the mind of God and it was thinking "I wonder if I left the oven on." But Hakwing was a risk-taker.
Part of this quest included his writings that brought the clever stuff of physics within touching distance of the average human understanding. His book A Brief History of Time was a tome everyone bought, some of them read, and a handful understood even through the last chapters where it all gets a bit difficult. It sold an estimated 9 million copies. Wow.
This brought Hawking fame as a scientist, leading him to become the voice of science, which was ironic as by this point his disease had progresses such that he required an electronic speech synthesiser, about as apt a 'voice of science' as you could imagine.
Hawking began to appear in a wide variety of pop culture outlets, including a cameo role on The Simpsons, which is how you really know you've made it.
He wasn't always right, though. He had a long standing bet with Peter Higgs over the existence of the Higgs Boson (which, unsurprisingly, Higgs was a big fan of). The two would debate the existence of this particle vigorously, right up until the moment someone build a Large Hadron Collider, mashed a few molecules together and went 'Look, there's one over there'.
To his credit, Hawking immediately paid up.
Hawking is also one of the few people in history to hold a party at which nobody turns up, and he's glad.
As a test of his thinking that time travel is impossible, Hawking held a party open to all in 2009. He had food and champagne laid on for all comers. But he publicised the party only after it was over so that only time-travellers would know to attend.
Nobody came, as he expected, and he was delighted.
Of course, it's possible time travellers have better things to do than attend celebrity parties, but it was all good PR and anything that continues to keep people interested in science has to be a good thing.
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| Where you're going, you don't need wheels |
Hawking died in his home in Cambridge, England at the age of 76, which is pretty good going for someone given only a few years to live at the age of 21.
Good on you Stephen, you sure showed 'em.
