Physicist Stephen Hawking has died

Legendary Physicist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76.

He did ground-breaking work on Black holes, space-time and cosmology.

He became well known to the public with the best selling book “A Brief History of Time”. This was made into a movie by Stephen Spielberg.

Hawking had a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) that gradually paralyzed him over the decades. He was still able to communicate using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device.

At the release party for the home video version of the A Brief History of Time, Leonard Nimoy, who had played Spock on Star Trek, learned that Hawking was interested in appearing on the show. Nimoy made the necessary contact, and Hawking played a holographic simulation of himself in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993. In 1999 he made one of several appearances on The Simpsons. Hawking also guest-starred in Futurama and The Big Bang Theory.

Hawking allowed the use of his copyrighted voice in the biographical 2014 film The Theory of Everything, in which he was portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in an Academy Award-winning role.