Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Normal Table"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Stephen Hawking is the most famous scientist of our time. Considered a kind of contemporary Einstein for his discoveries in physics, he also embodies the myth of a tragic hero for living almost immobile in a wheelchair and dependent on a voice synthesizer as a result of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This illness manifested itself in his youth, when Hawking began to amaze academics at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, consolidating research and theories on black holes that began to revolutionize cosmology in the 1970s. Writer Michael White and astrophysicist John Gribbin provide an accessible explanation of Hawking's theories, which involve the implications of space and time, matter and energy, developing themes such as the Big Bang, the Big Crunch, the origin and evolution of the Universe, and even travel through time, space, and matter. It provides a description of surprising events, such as the genius's encounter with Pope John Paul II at a meeting of cosmologists convened at the Vatican during the Rome Conference in 1981. In addition to his achievements, Stephen Hawking: A Life for Science offers a behind-the-scenes look at British academia, revealing the difficulties and lessons learned from this pop star's personal and family life, and his political activism for disability rights, the environment, and social causes in Great Britain. A protagonist of a publishing feat, he turned his book "A Brief History of Time" into a worldwide bestseller, in which he showed laymen what seemed incomprehensible: making physics more seductive and a little less complicated for many. "Hawking is at the forefront of what we know about the cosmos," state the authors of this biography, a winning combination of personal profile and scientific dissemination.
