Research paper on Stephen hawking
... 63. After being diagnosed with ALS, Hawking lost any interests in proceeding with his research in science. Until he met a girl he wanted to marry and realized he had to complete his doctorate to get a job. After completing his doctorate in 1966 Hawking was awarded a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At first his position was that of Research Fellow, but later he became a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. In 1973 he left the Institute of Astronomy and joined to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge. He became Professor of Gravitational Physics at Cambridge in 1977. In 1979 Hawking was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. The man born 300 years to the day after Galileo died now held the same chair at Cambridge that Sir Isaac Newton himself once held. Between 1965 and 1970 Hawking worked on singularities in the theory of general relativity devising new mathematical techniques to study this area of cosmology. Much of his work in this area was done in collaboration with Roger Penrose who, at that time, was at Birkbeck College, London. From 1970 Hawking began to apply his previous ideas to the study of black holes. Hawking discovered in 1970 a remarkable property. Using quantum theory and general relativity he was able to show that black holes can emit radiation. His success with proving this made him work from that time on combining the theory of general relativity with quantum theory. In 1971 Hawking investigated the creation of the Universe and predicted that, following the big bang, many objects as heavy as 109 tons but only the size of a proton would be created. These mini black holes have large gravitational attraction governed by general relativity, while the laws of quantum mechanics would apply to objects that small. Another remarkable achievement of Hawking's using these techniques was his no boundary proposal made in 1983 with Jim Hartle of Santa Barbara. Hawking explains that this would mean that both time and space are finite in extent, but they don’t have any boundary and edge there would be no singularities, and the laws of science would hold everywhere, including at the beginning of the universe. In 1982 Hawking decided to write a popular book on cosmology. By 1984 he had produced a first draft of A Brief History of Time. However Hawking was to suffer a further illness. This time, Hawking had caught pneumonia and was rushed to a hospital in Geneva, where he had been working. The doctors there told his wife that it was not worth keeping the life support machine on. But she was having none of that. I was flown back to Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, where a surgeon called Roger Grey carried out a tracheotomy. “A tracheotomy is a surgical procedure in which a cut or opening is made in the windpipe (trachea). The surgeon inserts a tube into the opening to bypass an obstruction, allow air to get to the lungs, or remove secretions.” (http://www.healthatoz.com/healthatoz/Atoz/ency/tracheotomy.jsp) This procedure had saved his life, but it took away his ability to speak, making it nearly impossible for him to communicate. Before the operation, his speech had been getting more slurred, so that only a few people who knew him well, could understand him. He wrote scientific papers by dictating to a secretary, and gave seminars through an interpreter, who repeated his words more clearly. However, the tracheostomy operation removed his ability to speak altogether. For a time, the only way Hawking could communicate was to spell out words letter by letter, by raising his eyebrows when someone pointed to the right letter on a spelling card. Of course, it is pretty difficult to carry on a conversation like that, let alone write a scientific paper. However, a computer expert in California, called Walt Woltosz, heard of Stephen’s condition. He sent Stephen a computer program that he had written, called Equalizer. This allowed the disabled Hawking to select words from a series of menus on the screen, by pressing a switch in his hand. A switch, operated by head or eye movement could also control the program. When Hawking has built up what he wants to say, he then sends it through a speech synthesizer. At first, he was only able to run the Equalizer program on a desktop computer. However David Mason, of Cambridge Adaptive Communication, fitted a small portable computer and speech synthesizer to Hawking’s electric wheel chair. This system allowed him to communicate better then ever before,...