Professor Stephen Hawking
 

Professor Stephen Hawking

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He’s been described as science’s first real rock star and the most famous physicist never to win a Nobel Prize, he knows black holes and p-branes inside out.

Hawking, 66, who has advanced motor neuron disease and is confined to a wheelchair, communicates via a computer and a voice synthesiser.

Hawkings’ illness, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease, was diagnosed when he was 21.

Doctors, giving him a lifespan of no more than two or three years, told him he should not bother to finish his doctoral thesis.


He progressively lost the use of his arms and legs, and, after a bout of pneumonia, his voice, and is now almost completely paralysed.


He was reduced to using a thumb to control the computer system attached to his wheelchair, but when he became too weak for even that, he went over to an infra-red "blink switch" clipped to his glasses.


By squeezing his cheek muscles he is able to scan and select characters on the screen to write, surf the web, send e-mail and "speak" through the synthesizer.


His disability has not dulled his appetite for adventure.


In April last year he became the first quadraplegic to float free in zero-gravity, in a flight paid for by billionaire Richard Branson.


In a converted Boeing 727 nicknamed the "Vomit Comet", Hawking experienced weightlessness eight times as the plane went through a series of parabolas.


The flight was in preparation for his goal of an excursion beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in 2009 as a guest of Branson’s Virgin Galactic space tourism company.


Despite his scientific bent, Hawking has an impish sense of humour, joking about meeting Marilyn Monroe, "a celestial object", through time travel, and playing a hologram of himself in an episode of Star Trek.


Hawking, divorced once and busy divorcing his second wife, was some years ago asked in a television interview what he didn’t understand about the universe. He replied: "Women."