Cambridge unveils Stephen Hawking archive
A huge collection of the popular British astrophysicist’s personal and scientific papers has been catalogued and is now available to historians and researchers at Cambridge University Library.
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Fountain: EFE/Cambridge
Rights: Creative Commons.
After his family donated it to the United Kingdom in 2021, scientific and personal archive from a British professor Stephen Hawking (Oxford, 1942 – Cambridge, 2018) has been fully catalogued and is now available to all who can benefit from its access to Cambridge University Librarythe institution where he was a professor.
IN 113 boxes of material There is a treasure trove of tens of thousands of pages of documents related to his work on theoretical physicsalthough it also moves letters to his familyIncludes one of the first dictations using his now famous communication system, obtained after a tracheostomy in 1986.
The archive also contains memoirs of his meetings with popes, presidents and the general public, as well as photographs and film scripts. Series How Simpson, Secret materials And Futurama.
The person responsible for cataloging the file, Susan Gordonnotes that the material left behind by Hawking “documents not only his rise to become one of the most prominent theoretical physicists of his time, but also his efforts to communicate science to a wider audience, which led to his status as a pop culture icon.”
“The articles show how the same tenacity that Hawking demonstrated in his professional career was applied to advocating for causes he believed in, including disability rights,” Gordon said.
Hawking, who suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) From the age of 22, he kept up a correspondence that shows how active he was on issues such as disability rights and nuclear disarmament. Some letters describe his campaigning on behalf of colleagues trapped behind the Iron Curtain during the war. Cold WarFor example.
In a letter to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1978, Hawking wrote that there were “no facilities for disabled people” there, and referred to the Disabled and Chronically Ill Persons Act 1970, which required improved access to the building.
A great physicist and conversationalist
Hawking, who died in 2018 at the age of 76, laid the foundations modern cosmology and presented the complex world to the general public in a didactic and relatively simple way black holes.
He was also the author of the book A Brief History of Timein which he explained the latest discoveries about the nature of black holes and the origin of the Universe.
The robotic synthesizer voice he has been forced to use to communicate since 1985 and his wheelchair-bound figure have appeared on numerous programmes and SeriesHow Simpson, Star Trek And The Big Bang Theory.
In Cambridge, where he worked at Gonville and Caius College, the researcher received a prestigious award Lucas Department of Mathematicsfounded in 1663 and also owned by Isaac Newton.
The opening of access to the Hawking Archive and the presentation of the catalogue coincide with the publication of a special collection of the British physicist’s papers in the latest issue of the journal. Science Museum Group Journal.