“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.”
These were the words of the death-defying man, Stephen Hawking- who conquered the stars while sitting in his wheelchair, the most celebrated scientist of the 21st century- closed his eyes to the world on 14h March, 2018.
The mental giant was diagnosed with a rare Lou Gehrig’s disease at just the age of 21 while he was still a student at the Cambridge University, affected his bodily controls and reduced him to just the flexing of his fingers and voluntary eye movements gradually. However, his mental dexterity remained untouched. He fought his whole life with his disease and personal crisis that came along with it while at the same time conquering the scientific world. What is equally mind-boggling is that he had a career at all which in itself was a huge achievement for Hawking! But, he was not one to have settled just with that.
“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
The Master of Science did not only teach us about the stars, the black holes or the Big Bang theory, he made us topple over our imaginations; he became the symbol of hope, mystery and resilience for people around the globe.
Hawking became a household name and first gained attention in 1988 through his book “The Brief History of Time”. The book was a dumbed-down version of his discoveries and theories for people to understand easily. Despite the very real fact that Hawking was almost completely paralyzed since 1970, he wrote seven books in his lifetime with the last book that was published in 2010 and co-authored five others.
Hawking was known to be witty and irritatingly stubborn for whenever he would stumble upon a question or anything curious, he would not rest until he got it. His stubbornness also let him live with the probability of death for 49 years. In his last days, Hawking slowly and gradually paralyzed to the point where he could only communicate through his right cheek pulses that the computer would detect and help him select words to finally be spoken by the voice synthesizer. This process took almost 10 minutes to form a single sentence.
Hawking was an emblem of a human being, a genius mind that was trapped in a frail and emaciated body. His name will go down in history- as it already has- with the likes of Einstein and Newton for the remainder of mankind’s existence. Stephen Hawking would dearly be missed!
Written by Sawera Shaikh!