Who Was Stephen Hawking?

Product Description Learn more about the renowned British scientist, professor, and author who spent his entire career trying to answer the question: "Where did the universe come from?" Stephen Hawking was born exactly three hundred years after the death of the scientist Galileo, so maybe it was written in the stars that he would become a famous scientist in his own right. Although he was diagnosed with a neurological disease at age 21, Stephen did not let the illness define his life. Known for his groundbreaking work in physics, and identified by his wheelchair and computerized voice system, Stephen continued his research until his death in 2018. He is best known for his black hole theories and his best-selling book A Brief History of Time. Stephen Hawking is an example of a person who had a great mind, but an even greater spirit. About the Author Jim Gigliotti is a writer based in Southern California. A former editor at the National Football League, he has written more than 50 books for readers of all ages, including biographies for young readers on Olympian Jesse Owens, baseball star Roberto Clemente, and musician Stevie Wonder. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Who Was Stephen Hawking? When Stephen Hawking was a young boy, he wanted a toy train more than anything else in the world. But he lived in England in the mid-1940s, during World War II. Toy makers weren’t making toys at that time. They were too busy helping the war effort. Their factories were being used to help build planes and bombs for soldiers. Toy trains were hard to come by. So when Stephen was three years old, his father made him a wooden train. But Stephen didn’t think of it as a real train. He had to push it to make it go. Then Stephen’s father managed to find a windup train. After he turned the key, it moved on its own, but it still wasn’t the kind of train Stephen wanted. Stephen was hoping for an electric train with real moving parts. He wanted to study how the train worked—what made it go and what made it stop. Finally, when he was old enough, he took out all the money he had in his bank account and bought himself an electric train set. That was more like it! Stephen soon moved on to bigger things. He started building model airplanes. Then he worked on making toy boats. He didn’t really care how they looked. Instead, he was more interested in how they worked. Sometimes he took things apart. He wasn’t very good at putting them back together, but that didn’t matter. He wanted to study how all the different parts worked with one another. By the time he was a teenager, Stephen started thinking about how even larger things worked—really big things, like the universe, for instance. How did it start? he wondered. Does it get larger? Does it get smaller? Will it ever end? Those are big questions! Stephen never stopped asking those big questions. Nothing could stop him. Not even a disease that kept him in a wheelchair for most of his life. Not even losing his ability to speak, and then to move at all. Instead, he overcame the challenges of his disease and became a physicist. Physics is the study of matter (what all things are made of) and energy. People who study physics take a close look at how matter and energy move through space and time. Stephen kept thinking about the big questions his entire adult life. He wrote articles and books about black holes, the origin of the universe, and all kinds of things. He was a famous scientist, an important thinker, and an inspiration to people all over the world. Chapter 1: Beginnings When World War II began in Europe in 1939, Frank and Isobel Hawking lived in London, England. London was heavily bombed during the war by Germany, which was fighting on the other side. Many parts of the city were destroyed. The Hawkings’ home wasn’t hit, but one bomb landed just a few houses down the street from theirs. When Isobel was pregnant with Stephen in the early 1940s, she moved for a time to O