What are some cool lesser-known facts about Stephen Hawking?
Despite his poor grades early on, Hawking was able to get accepted at Oxford University.
When he was 9 years old, his grades ranked among the worst in his class. Nevertheless, from an early age he was interested in how stuff worked. He has talked about how he was known to disassemble clocks and radios.
Despite his poor grades, both his teachers and his peers seemed to understand that they had a future genius among them, evidenced by the fact that his nickname was "Einstein."
Hawking chose to study cosmology at university, even though it wasn't yet a popular field at the time.
Stephen Hawking took a liking to mathematics from an early age, and he would have liked to have majored in it. His father, Frank, however, had different ideas. He hoped Stephen would instead study medicine.
But, for all his interest in science, Stephen didn't care for biology. He has said that he found it to be "too inexact, too descriptive" . He would have rather devoted his mind to more precise, well-defined concepts.
Oxford University's rowing club practices for a race in 2010. Hawking had served as the coxswain for the school's team nearly five decades earlier.
Even before being diagnosed with a physically disabling illness, Hawking didn't have what one would call a large or athletic build. However, row teams recruited smaller men like Hawking to be coxswains -- a position that does not row, but rather controls steering and stroke rate.
Because rowing was so important and competitive at Oxford, Hawking's role on the team made him very popular.
Helped Create the Boundless Universe Theory
Time also fits into the Earth comparison. Because Einstein showed that space and time are relative to each other, physicists measure them together in spacetime. And, because of this relationship and mathematical observations showing the universe is expanding, physicists believe time is affected by the expansion of the universe.One of Hawking's major achievements (which he shares with Jim Hartle) was to come up with the theory that the universe has no boundaries in 1983.In 1983, the effort to understand the nature and shape of the universe, Hawking and Hartle combined the concepts of quantum mechanics (the study of the behavior of microscopic particles) with general relativity (Einstein's theories about gravity and how mass curves space) to show that the universe is a contained entity and yet has no boundaries. President Obama gives Hawking the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In his long career in physics, Hawking has racked up an incredibly impressive array of awards and distinctions. In 1974, he was inducted into the Royal Society (the royal academy of science in the U.K., dating back to 1660), and a year later, Pope Paul VI awarded him and Roger Penrose the Pius XI Gold Medal for Science. He also went on to receive the Albert Einstein Award and Hughes Medal from the Royal Society. In the 1980s, he was invested as a Commander of the British Empire, which is a rank in the U.K. just under being knighted. In 2009, Hawking was awarded the United States' highest civilian honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. All the while, Hawking attained at least 12 honorary degrees. However, the Nobel Prizecontinues to elude him.
