Stephen Hawking

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Stephen Hawking is the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. Now Director of Research at the Institute for Theoretical Cosmology
at Cambridge, his other books for the general reader include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe and The Universe in a Nutshell.

In 1963, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. Yet he went on to Cambridge to become a brilliant researcher and Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. Since 1979 he has held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663. Professor Hawking has over a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Science. Stephen Hawking is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.

Stephen's latest book..

In this groundbreaking new work, Professor Hawking and renowned science writer Leonard Mlodinow have drawn on forty years of Hawking's own research and a recent series of extraordinary astronomical observations and theoretical breakthroughs to reveal an original and controversial theory.

They convincingly argue that scientific obsession with formulating a single new model may be misplaced, and that by synthesising existing theories we may discover the key to finally understanding the universe's deepest mysteries. You can order your copy here.

James Hartle

"Stephen and I go back nearly forty years to when we we were both starting out at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy led by Fred Hoyle. We've been on the same wavelength ever since. The most important topic we worked on together is the no-boundary quantum state of the universe. Such a theory of the universe's quantum state is essential for understanding the extreme conditions of the big-bang. In many ways, the no-boundary state is the simplest state the universe could have had. That is consistent with the remarkable simplicity of the early universe revealed by observations of the cosmic background radiation --- the light from the big bang. Today, more than 25 years after its proposal, the no-boundary state has successfully explained the origin of classical spacetime, the origin of the detailed structure of the universe seen in the distribution of galaxies, and the arrows of time of the universe. Stephen, Thomas Hertog, and I are continuing to work to see how far the no boundary
quantum state can go in explaining our quantum universe."