Stephen Hawking Dies Aged 76
Stephen Hawking, world-famous British physicist, died at the age of 76 at his home in Cambridge, England. The scientist became famous for his work on black holes, relativity and quantum mechanics.
In his most famous discovery, Hawking showed that black holes leak a bit of energy, known as Hawking radiation and then shrink and evaporate.
At the age of 22, Stephen Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, a rare disease of the nervous system. At that time doctors gave him only a few years to live. However, Hawking proved them wrong and fought bravely against his illness. He spent most of his life paralyzed in a wheelchair and was only able to speak through a voicesynthesizer.
Hawking was not only a professor at Cambridge University until 2009, but also a popular celebrity who appeared in TV shows like the Simpsons, and the Big Bang Theory. He also wrote a bestselling book about the mysteries of the universe called A Brief History of Time, which sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. His early life was dramatized in the 2014 film "The Theory of Everything", which received several Academy Award nominations.
Because of him, many ordinary people got interested in physics and the universe. Scientists, politicians and other experts around the world praised Hawking as a person with a brilliant and extraordinary mind.
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Words
- Academy Award = an Oscar
- black hole = an area in space into which everything near it, including light, is pulled
- bravely = with a lot of courage
- brilliant = extremely clever and intelligent
- celebrity = famous person
- diagnosed = to find out what illness someone has
- discovery = finding something for the first time
- evaporate = here: disappear slowly
- extraordinary = great and impressive
- however = but
- leak = a hole that lets something through
- mind = your thoughts and ability to think
- nervous system = your brain and nerves in your body; it controls what you feel and how you move
- ordinary = normal, like you and me
- paralysed = unable to move or feel all or parts of your body
- physicist = a scientist who has special knowledge of physics
- politicians = people who work in the government, parliament or for political parties
- popular = well-known
- praise = to admire and approve of someone
- quantum mechanics = the scientific study of the way atoms and smaller parts of things behave
- radiation = form of energy which may be dangerous in large amounts
- rare = something that does not exist very often
- receive = get
- relativity = the relationship in physics between time, space and movement; the theory was created by Albert Einstein
- several = some, a few
- scientist = a person who is trained in science and works in a lab
- universe = all of space, including the stars and planets
- voice synthesizer = a computer system that produces sounds like human speech
- wheelchair = a chair with wheels, used by people who cannot walk