Stephen Hawking was given two years to live at 21, when doctors diagnosed him with motor neurone disease. He lived to 76. The physics he produced in that time — black hole radiation, the no-boundary proposal for the beginning of the universe, the information paradox — reshaped cosmology. For the last decades of his life he communicated through a single cheek muscle, selecting words from a screen at about one word per minute. He wrote three books that way. A Brief History of Time sold 10 million copies. He said the diagnosis was, in some ways, useful. It focused him.
January 8, 1942
84 years ago
What Else Happened on January 8
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