Imagine if you will, you can only move your left hand an inch or so, otherwise you are completely paralyzed. You cannot talk or hardly move. This disease is called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease, or ALS and this is what Stephen Hawking has. Despite his handicap he has managed to become one of the best scientists ever. He has been compared to Einstein and Isaac Newton.

Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 (exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. When Hawking was born his family moved to St. Albans, 20 miles south of London. As a boy Hawking was bad at sports and underweight. Early in his life he developed an interest in complicated games and electronics. He and some other students at St. Albans School attempted to build a computer when they were about 16. They succeeded in building a computer they named LUCE that performed complicated yet useless operations.

In 1958 a computer was owned by almost nobody at home. To build a computer then was considered extremely hard. This project appeared in several British newspapers. The school newspaper "the Albanian" joked that one day all students would carry a LUCE in their pocket. Now most do, a LUCE was an early calculator. Although Hawking was great at electronics his greatest talent was mathematics.

After his five years at St. Albans school he moved on to Oxford. There he studied physics. He was amazing at it. He did work in an hour that took other students hours and hours to do. He once estimated he did only 1,000 hours of homework in his 3 years at Oxford. That comes out to about an hour a day. Most physics students do about 10 hours a day of homework. His fellow or professor at Oxford was Professor Robert Burman, a very talented man. Hawking’s next goal was to earn his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Cambridge. He wanted to specialize in cosmotology.

To earn the right to go to Cambridge he needed to graduate his class with first class honors, or highest in his class. His great abilities in physics were weakened by his poor study habits. After his final exam Stephen was borderline between first class and second class honors. To determine his degree the professors decided to give him an oral exam in which he would have to answer questions asked orally. Most people would be very nervous in this situation, but not Hawking. He passed the test with flying colors. So he went on to Cambridge.

By now Stephen had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. ALS slowly destroys the nerves in the brain and spine. ALS victims usually die within 2-5 years because it destroys the muscles used for breathing which leads to suffocation.

When he was diagnosed with ALS he pretty much gave up his life. He stayed in his room almost all the time. He says life seemed to go by so fast in those first two years. After he did not die after two years he realized he could go on with ALS and his study of cosmotology. Although he was weak he could still walk. After that 2 years he decided he couldn’t waste any time, there were things he wanted to do in his life. Hawking wanted to get married and get a Ph.D. So he was engaged to Jane Wilde in 1965. Hawking said, "It [getting married to her] made me determined to live, to go on. Jane really gave me the will to live." Meanwhile they were having trouble finding a house. Finally they found one. Then he got his Ph.D. and started to work at Cambridge. He was now officially known as Professor Dr. Stephen William Hawking. His health was worsening now.

A neutron star is as heavy as our sun but about the size of a large city. These stars have as much density as all of the buildings in the U.S. packed into a pen cap. On the face of a neutron I would weigh about 1,050,000,000,000 pounds. But there are places with an even greater density. These are called singularities or black holes.  They have so much density at "zero" size that light cannot escape from them. The event horizon on a black hole is the outside edge and whatever happens inside the event horizon cannot be seen from the outside. The gravitational pull of black holes are so great that if you were to stand on one while it was forming you would be split in half at about the waist. The reason for this is that as the gravitational pull gets greater the height difference matters more.

Another subject Hawking studied and still does study is the origin of the universe. Hawking and a man named Roger Penrose worked together to find out if the whole universe began with the big bang or before that with a similar sort of explosion. The gravitational pull of the planets are pulling the galaxies together as they are flying apart, then they will stop and start to come into each other all ending in what physicists think will be the big crunch or the ending of the universe.

To prove this theory Penrose and Hawking had to work with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics explains the behavior of atoms, electrons, etc., etc. During his life so far, Hawking did more work on black holes and the big bang that I cannot explain or understand. How do you think Stephen Hawking is supposed to express all of these amazing ideas when he cannot move almost at all? He uses a computer that talks for him using a voice synthesizer. He can only control it through one button he uses with his left hand. Here are a few words from Hawking on his computer:

"I communicate with a computer system. I have an IBM compatible computer, in the box on the back of my wheelchair. It runs from a battery under the wheelchair, although an internal battery will keep the computer running for an hour if necessary. The screen is mounted on the arm of the wheelchair where I can see it. This system was put together for me by David Mason, of Cambridge Adaptive Communications.

On the computer, I run a program called EqualizerTM, written by a company called Word Plus inc. A cursor moves across the upper part of the screen. I can stop it by pressing a switch in my hand. In this way I can select words, which are printed in the lower part of the screen. When I have built a sentence, I can send it to a speech synthesizer. I use a separate synthesizer made by Speech+. It is the best I have heard, though it gives me an accent that has been described variously as Scandinavian, American or Scottish.

I can save what I write on disk. I write papers using a formatting program called TEX. I can write equations in words, and the program translates them into symbols, and prints them out on paper in the appropriate type. I can also give lectures. I write the lecture beforehand, and save it on disk. I can then send it to the speech synthesizer, one sentence at a time. It works quite well, I can try out a lecture, and polish it, before I give it."

Despite his ALS Stephen Hawking has become one of the greatest scientists of all time. He has changed the way people around the world think about physics.