Passage Two

Stephen Having was born on 8 January. 1942 and grew up in St Albans，the eldest of four brothers and sisters. His father was a research biologist and his mother a medical research secretary, so it was not surprising that he was interested in science. As a student he was drawn to physics and maths as he believed they offered the most fundamental insights into the world. But nothing marked him out as special from his classmates or in his first terra at Oxford University.

Stephen got first in Physics from Oxford, and started a PhD at Cambridge. His own private universe expanded when he proposed to his future wife. Jane was also from St Albans , and was a modem languages undergraduate. She had met Hawking at a New Year’s party, before his diagnosis. The couple decided to marry quickly, because they did not know how long Stephen had to live. As Stephen’s health deteriorated, he took to walking with stick.

Hawking escaped the limits of his disability by training his mind to work in a new way. As he started to lose the use of his limbs, he developed a way of visualizing problems in his mind to reach a solution instead of by writing equations .Some of his colleagues have suggested that this way of thinking has led to his greatest discoveries. Hawking was now working on one of science’s most bizarre ideas-black holes, an extreme prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Hawking’s work on black boles helped prove the idea of a “Big Bang” at the birth of the Universe. Developed in the 1940s, Big Bang theory was still not accepted by all scientists. Working with mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking realized that black holes were like the Big Bang in reverse—and that meant the maths he'd used to describe black boles also described the Dig Bang. It was a key moment in showing the Big Bang really happened. As his body deteriorated, Hawking’s career was taking off.

As a leading figure in science, Hawking________.