Dr Stephen Hawking And His Time In Sudbury

World renowned physicist Dr Stephen Hawking passed away this week at his home in  Cambridge, England.  He was 76 when he passed which is just one more incredible thing about the man who was just a 21-year-old Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge when he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors told him he only had one or two years to live at most.

Professor Hawking first visited Sudbury on two occasion for the  SNO experiment Grand Opening ceremony in April 1998 and again in September of 2012. The underground SNOLAB (Sudbury Neutrino Observatory) is located more than 2 kilometres below the earth’s surface.  SNOLAB is the world’s second-deepest underground lab facility and its 6,800 feet or 2,070 metres of overhead rock provides a 6010 metre water equivalent (MWE) shielding from cosmic rays which provides a low-background environment for experiments requiring high sensitivities and extremely low counting rates.  During the 2012 visit, Dr. Nigel Smith stated “It is a great delight to welcome Professor Hawking to the SNOLAB facility and show him the wonderful scientific research that is underway here. Since his first visit we have expanded the facility greatly, and introduced new projects studying particles and processes within the Universe. It is a pleasure to be able to explore with him the connections between the theoretical physics that Professor Hawking undertakes, and the experimental programs at SNOLAB.” 

Professor Hawking is just as famous in popular culture as he is as a physicist. His rise to pop-culture icon was fueled by the phenomenal popularity of Hawking’s popular-science book A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide since first being released in 1988. That book was followed by a collection of essays titled Black Holes and Baby Universes in 1993.  The Universe in a Nutshell was published in 2001 and his most recent science work, A Briefer History of Time , co-written by Leonard Mlodinow, updated his earlier works to make them accessible to a wider audience was published in 2005. In 2007 Hawking and his daughter, Lucy Hawking, published George’s Secret Key to the Universe, a children’s book focusing on science.

In recent years, Professor Hawking made several appearances on television. In addition to appearing in science shows, he has also made several guest appearances in Futurama and had a cameo on Star Trek: The Next Generation playing poker with Data, Newton, and Einstein.

He also made multiple appearances on The Simpsons with one of his most memorable cameos involved Hawking talking to Homer about his donut theory.

Big Bang Theory fans will also recall Professor Hawking correcting Sheldon’s math on an episode.

Hawking helped to raise Canada’s profile in the physics community in 2008 when he accepted a research post at the country’s “crown jewel” of theoretical physics study. He agreed to take the title of distinguished research chair at the prestigious Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ont., and visited the facility in the summer of 2010 and again in 2012.

His early life was chronicled in the 2014 film “The Theory of Everything,” with Eddie Redmayne winning the best actor Academy Award for his portrayal of the scientist.

Hawking met Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister while he  was a graduate student at Cambridge and shortly before his diagnosis with motor neurone disease. They got engaged in October 1964 – Hawking later said that the engagement gave him “something to live for“ – and the two were married on 14 July 1965. Jane began a PhD programme, and a son, Robert, was born in May 1967.  A daughter, Lucy, was born in 1970 and a third child, Timothy, was born in April 1979.  By the 1980s, Hawking’s marriage had been strained for many years and his views of religion also contrasted with her strong Christian faith and resulted in tension. In the late 1980s, Hawking grew close to one of his nurses, Elaine Mason. Hawking told Jane that he was leaving her for Mason,and departed the family home in February 1990. After his divorce in 1995, Hawking married Mason in September, declaring, “It’s wonderful – I have married the woman I love.

Professor Stephen Hawking was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was also the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009 before he became research director at the University’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.