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>> British scientist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. He was one of the most respected and well-known scientists in modern history. Hawking was diagnosed with a wasting motor neuron disease at the age of 21. And was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life.
But Reuters Ben Hershey says, it was his ability to relay complex science to the masses that made him stand out.>> He was a great communicator. A great communicator of complex scientific ideas in a very popular way. Obviously, his book: "A Brief History of Time" was an enormous success completely defined skeptics who though the public wouldn't want to read about such a complicated area.
And of course, he came into people's lives through television, appearing in "The Simpsons" and so on.>> That book A Brief History of Time published in 1988, made him a household name across the world.>> Yet, if that's I hope basic science becomes part of general awareness, what now appear as the paradoxes of quantum theory will seem as just common sense to our children's children.
>> Hawking was proud that the book contained only one equation, relativity's famous e = mc squared. But his impact goes well beyond a book intended to make physics accessible.>> Scientifically, his big legacy is understanding the links between gravity and quantum theory. So that's the theory of the very big and the very small, the very sub atomic.
And he explained that in terms of black hole theory. He explained how black holes weren't really completely black. They actually radiated and they eventually will evaporate. And we now know that as Hawking radiation.>> As Hawking's condition grew worse, he had to resort to speaking through a voice synthesizer.
In his 2013 memoir, My Brief History, he said, his disease had led to the collapse of his two marriages. But he also said, it pushed him to work harder to explore the very limits of human understanding both in the fields of astronomy and the submolecular world of quantum theory.
Which Hawking said, could predict what happens at the beginning of time and its end.