Stephen Hawking was born 80 years ago, the physicist to whom black holes have ceased to be an imaginative hypothesis and interstellar space travel has become a real challenge.
To his great curiosity and the tenacity with which he faced scientific research and life, despite the disease that tormented him for years.
Google dedicates the doodle.
"I spent my life traveling in the universe, through my mind", we read in the animation of Google, a universe in which "nothing is perfect", because "perfection simply does not exist". After all, "black holes aren't really black either: they shine like a hot body, and the smaller they are, the brighter they are."
Born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, Hawking has always been fascinated by the universe and by 1963 this passion had led him to Cambridge University. The years between 1965 and 1975 are among the most productive of his scientific career and his research on black holes has allowed to confirm the theory of the Big Bang, the explosion from which the universe was born. From the 1970s he had begun to work on the possibility of integrating the two great theories of contemporary physics: Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He dreamed of them brought together in the "theory of everything", which inspired James Marsh's film in 2014. The dream of space and interstellar travel accompanied him to the end,bringing it in 2007 to face a parabolic flight and later to join the Breakthrough Starshot project, which involves sending a fleet of solar sails to search for life forms towards the nearest star, Alpha Centauri. He died on March 14, 2018 and, in addition to his remarkable scientific legacy, remains the asteroid that bears his name, 7672 Hawking.
In the short video from Google, which in two and a half minutes covers the salient moments of life and the topics to which Hawking has dedicated his research, the scientist says: “we are very young.
But we are capable of very, very big things.
There should be no boundaries to human activities.
As bad as life may seem, as long as there is life there is hope.
Be brave, curious, determined, overcome adversity.
You can do it ".