Stephen Hawking
Dies at 76; His Mind
Roamed the Cosmos
A physicist and best-selling author, Dr. Hawking did not
allow his physical limitations to hinder his quest to answer
“the big question: Where did the universe come from?”
Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist
and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a
wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin
of the universe and becoming an emblem of human
determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his
home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge
University.
“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the
public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions
of people around the world” Michio Kaku, a professor of
theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said
in an interview.
Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book “A Brief
History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black
Holes,” published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million
copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris.
The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything”
was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie
Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for
best actor.
Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a
discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it
explodes.
What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As
a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting
disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was
given only a few years to live.
The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a
finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental
faculties untouched.
He went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring
gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless
gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can
escape them.
That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing
itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his
brain when Dr. Hawking set out to apply quantum theory,
the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black
holes. In a long and daunting calculation, Dr. Hawking
discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those
mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really
black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle,
leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and
disappear over the eons. (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/stephenhawking-dead.html.
Adapted)
Leia as proposições abaixo. Marque a opção que
corresponda à sequência de alternativas CORRETAS.
I. Stephen Hawking nasceu por volta de 1942.
II. “Spokesman” pode ser traduzido como “porta-voz”.
III. Hawking foi o único teórico da sua geração a falar da
gravidade e das propriedades do buraco negro.
IV. Os buracos negros podem eventualmente vazar
radiação, partículas, explodir e por fim desaparecerem.
