MARCH MARKED THE passing of the most recognisable physicist of our generation, Stephen Hawking.

But he was more than just a physicist. He was a best-selling author, an inspirational speaker and a cultural icon, and all while suffering from a debilitating neurological disease.

Hawking began his life in physics at Oxford. According to Hawking himself, he rarely turned up for lectures and claims to have studied for only an hour a day – far less than what is expected of our Leaving Cert students.

Indeed, his final marks at Oxford were so poor that Hawking had to be interviewed to see if he was worthy of an honours degree. But a deal was stuck that he would leave for Cambridge if awarded a first. With a first in hand, he took off to begin his studies at Cambridge on some of the most challenging problems in modern physics.

He loved a challenge

Hawking loved a challenge and was soon thinking about the nature of black holes and the origins of the universe. During his second year at Cambridge he showed that massive stars could collapse to infinitely small sizes containing infinitely large densities.

These so-called “singularities” would lie in the centre of a black hole, from which nothing, not even light, could escape.

And this was only the start. Working with another brilliant young student, Roger Penrose, they began to think about the “big bang” and how they might be able to understand it using the same physics that they had used to understand black holes.

Their results gave us a new understanding of the very origins of the universe and how space-time would have behaved during the earliest times of our universe.

Devastating for young Hawking

But tragedy struck. Soon after his twenty-first birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, a debilitating neurological disease, which causes muscles to waste away, the inability to breath, and the loss of the ability to speak. (I myself know this disease well, as my own father passed away only a few short years after being diagnosed with it).

This must have been devastating for the young Hawking, who was making a meteoric rise in astrophysics and was dating his then girlfriend, Jane Wilde.  Despite the diagnosis, which would could have driven him into despair, Hawking continued to work with his usual enthusiasm, later commenting that:

“Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap – it is all in the mind”.

Irish angle

Here in Ireland, we are now testing some of these exotic ideas with a brand new radio telescope at Birr, Co Offaly, called the Irish Low Frequency Array (I-LOFAR). Funded by Science Foundation Ireland, I-LOFAR is allowing a new generation of Irish astronomers to study explosions on the Sun and other stars, search for new planets and try to understand the large scale structure of the universe.

Hawking will perhaps be best remembered for his best-selling book, “A Brief History of Time”, which was first published in 1988 and is sometimes described one of the most unreadable bestsellers of all time.

But that said, the book sold more that 10 million copies and was on the Sunday Times bestseller list for over 5 years. Surely testament to Hawking’s fascinating ideas on black holes, the big bang and the future of the universe.

Professor Hawking’s book has been an inspiration to many, which was certainly the case for me as a young physics student at University College Dublin.

I clearly remember being blown away by the mind-bending physics of the book after my parents bought me a copy for doing well in my first year exams. I was particularly impressed that one of my physics professors, Neil Porter, was actually mentioned in the book. Fame indeed.

Now being an Astrophysicist myself at Trinity College Dublin, I hope that I can now pass on some of Professor Hawking’s wonderful ideas and insights to inspire the next generation of cosmic explorers here in Ireland.

Ní bheidh a leithéid arís sa damhain

Peter Gallagher is a Professor in Astrophysics in Trinity College.

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