The man who lived with his own disability could change the whole world of space and science with his incredible and unique theoretical proof like the concept of space-time, black holes, time travel, and many more mind-blowing experiments.
Stephen Hawking college life:
He was like the ordinary boy with no disabilities in his earlier life, but destiny had something for him. What we today knew as the greatest scientist with disabilities.
He doesn’t let his disability to lose his passion and dreams. He told us the meaning of what we know as happiness as he did not belong to those who once fell down and never tried to bounce back in life.
Like many famous people, he self-taught himself the meaning of persistence and mental toughness to face the challenges thrown by life. If he can make the world a better place to live with his disability, what makes us disabled to make this world a better place to live without any disability. What is the disability which causes him to be seated in the wheelchair?
Hawking had a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of motor neuron disease (MND; also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease).
A fatal neurodegenerative disease that affects the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord, which gradually paralyzed him over decades.
During his final year at Oxford, Hawking experienced increasing clumsiness, including a fall on some stairs and difficulties rowing. The problems worsened, and his speech became slightly slurred.
His family noticed the changes when he returned home for Christmas, and medical investigations were begun. The MND diagnosis came when Hawking was 21, in 1963. At the time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years.
Condition get worsened in the 1960s
In the late 1960s, Hawking’s physical abilities declined: he began to use crutches and could no longer give lectures regularly. As he slowly lost the ability to write, he developed compensatory visual methods, including seeing equations in terms of geometry.
The physicist Werner Israel later compared the achievements to Mozart composing an entire symphony in his head. Hawking was fiercely independent and unwilling to accept help or make concessions for his disabilities.
He preferred to be regarded as “a scientist first, popular science writer second, and, in all the ways that matter, a normal human being with the same desires, drives, dreams, and ambitions as the next person.” His wife, Jane Hawking, later noted: “Some people would call it determination, some obstinacy. I’ve called it both at one time or another.”
He required much persuasion to accept the use of a wheelchair at the end of the year 1960s but ultimately became notorious for the wildness of his wheelchair driving. Hawking was a popular and witty colleague, but his illness and reputation for brashness distanced him from some.
When Stephen Hawking first began using a wheelchair in the late 1970s, he was using standard motorized models. The earliest surviving example of these chairs was made by BEC Mobility and sold by Christie’s in November 2018 for £296,750.
Hawking continued to use this type of chair until the early 1990s when his ability to use his hands to drive a wheelchair deteriorated.
The variety of wheelchairs used by Stephen Hawking are, Hawking used various chairs from that time, including a Dragon Mobility elevating powerchair from 2007, as shown in the April 2008 photo of Hawking attending NASA’s 50th anniversary; a Permobil C350 from 2014; and then a Permobil F3 from 2016.
Did you know our greatest scientist visited space with virgin galactic?
In late 2006, Hawking revealed in a BBC interview that one of his greatest unfulfilled desires was to travel to space; on hearing this, Richard Branson offered a free flight into space with Virgin Galactic, which Hawking immediately accepted.
Besides personal ambition, he was motivated to increase public interest in spaceflight and show the potential of people with disabilities. On 26 April 2007, Hawking flew aboard a specially-modified Boeing 727-200 jet operated by Zero-G Corp off the coast of Florida to experience weightlessness Fears that the manoeuvres would cause him undue discomfort proved groundless, and the flight was extended to eight parabolic arcs.
It was described as a successful test to see if he could withstand the g-forces involved in space flight. At the time, the date of Hawking’s trip to space was projected to be as early as 2009, but commercial flights to space did not commence before his death.
And we lost him on 14 March 2018 at the age of 76. He lived pretty long as the doctor suggested that he had only a few months to survive after diagnosing him with MND. His thought and his ideas are still alive within us.
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