11 Things That You Should Know About Stephen Hawking's Life - The Expansive Life of Stephen Hawking.<br /><br />==============================================<br />1. Stephen Hawking’s discovery that black holes are not really black and that they would eventually leak radiation and particles before exploding and disappearing turned scientists’ understanding of them upside down.<br /><br />2. Dr. Hawking in 1977. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, and was given less than three years to live.<br /><br />3. Dr. Hawking won millions of fans through his book “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies.<br /><br />4. Dr. Hawking and the former Jane Wilde, around 1990. They married in 1965. By his own account, his marriage gave him “something to live for”; he also had to find a job, which gave him an incentive to work seriously toward his doctorate. <br /><br />5. Dr. Hawking traveled the globe to scientific meetings, visiting every continent; wrote best-selling books about his work; and was not above appearing on television shows. He was in four episodes of “The Simpsons.”<br /><br />6. Dr. Hawking also appeared in other television shows including “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” shown here in 1993, and “The Big Bang Theory.”<br /><br />7. Dr. Hawking’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1990. In 1995, he married Elaine Mason, a nurse who had cared for him since 1985.<br /><br />8. Dr. Hawking held a lecture on “The Origin of the Universe” in Berlin in 2005. He had lost the ability to speak after a bout of pneumonia in 1985, but was able to communicate by using a computer program that allowed him to choose words that were sent to a speech synthesizer that vocalized for him, albeit with an American accent.<br /><br />9. Dr. Hawking pushed the limits in his professional and personal life. At 65, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a plane that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce fleeting periods of weightlessness. <br /><br />10. Dr. Hawking with his daughter, Lucy, and Christophe Galfard, a French physicist and writer, in his office at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England, in 2007. Dr. Hawking and his daughter wrote a trilogy of children’s books, the first titled “George’s Secret Key to the Universe.”<br /><br />11. Dr. Hawking in 2005. Among his many honors, he was named a commander of the British Empire in 1982. The only thing lacking was the Nobel Prize, and his explanation for this was characteristically pithy: “The Nobel is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on.”<br />
