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The man whose disability never hindered his ability…

Abha Gupta. Dated: 3/16/2018 8:14:09 AM

I’m not afraid of death,
but I’m in no hurry to die.
I have so much I want to do first: Hawking
ER ABHA GUPTA
Jammu, Mar 15
Stephen William Hawking life has set an example for those who think that disability is the main hindrance towards success. Hawking, his life and works touch millions not just because of his bestselling book, The Brief History of Time., but also because, unlike Newton and Einstein who contributed to a wide range of fields, he focused on cosmology, despite his extreme physical disability. Besides his contribution to cosmology since his graduate student days in Cambridge University, U.K., Hawking’s life was a major inspiration to people in general.
Professor Stephen William Hawking was born on 8th January 1942 (exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. Hawking had a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that gradually paralysed him over decades. Throughout his life, he was still able to communicate using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device. Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most.
He began to use crutches in the 1960s, but long fought the use of a wheelchair. When he finally relented, he became notorious for his wild driving along the streets of Cambridge, not to mention the intentional running over of students’ toes and the occasional spin on the dance floor at college parties.
Hawking’s run of radical discoveries led to his election in 1974 to the Royal Society at the young age of 32. Five years later, he became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, arguably Britain’s most distinguished chair, and one formerly held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac, the latter one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics.
Hawking married his college sweetheart, Jane Wilde, in 1965, two years after his diagnosis. In 1985, during a trip to Cern, Hawking was taken to hospital with an infection. He was so ill that doctors asked Jane if they should withdraw life support. The operation saved his life but destroyed his voice. The couple had three children, but the marriage broke down in 1991. Four years later, Hawking married Elaine Mason, one of the nurses employed to give him round-the-clock care. The marriage lasted 11 years.
Hawking won the Albert Einstein Award, the Wolf Prize, the Copley Medal, and the Fundamental Physics Prize. The Nobel prize, however, eluded him.
Stephen Hawking is dead. When diagnosed with ALS at the age of 22, his doctors gave him two years. Yet he lived till 76, he lived like a king.