3月14日，接到来自霍金家人的消息，斯蒂芬霍金在家中去世。让我们一起纪念这位宇宙级网红。下面为报道节选。一起再次走进他的传奇人生。
Stephen Hawking, modern cosmology's brightest star, dies aged 76（现代宇宙学最亮的恒星斯蒂芬霍金逝世，享年76岁）
我并不害怕死亡，但我并不急于死去。我有很多想做的事——斯蒂芬·霍金
The physicist and author of A Brief History of Time has died at his home in Cambridge. His children said: ‘We will miss him for ever’
这位物理学家和时间简史的作者在剑桥的家中去世。他的孩子们说：“我们将永远怀念他。”
Stephen Hawking obituary
斯蒂芬·霍金讣告
Professor Hawking’s insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
霍金教授的见解塑造了现代宇宙学，并激发了数百万人的全球听众。
Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76.
His family released a statement in the early hours of Wednesday morning confirming his death at his home in Cambridge.
Hawking’s children, Lucy, Robert and Tim said in a statement: “We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today.
“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.“他是一位伟大的科学家，也是一位非凡的人，他的工作和遗产将会持续多年。他的勇气和毅力和他的才华和幽默鼓舞了世界各地的人们。
“He once said: ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him for ever.”
For fellow scientists and loved ones, it was Hawking’s intuition and wicked sense of humour that marked him out as much as the broken body and synthetic voice that came to symbolise the unbounded possibilities of the human mind.
Hawking was driven to Wagner, but not the bottle, when he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the age of 21. Doctors expected him to live for only two more years. But Hawking had a form of the disease that progressed more slowly than usual. He survived for more than half a century and long enough for his disability to define him. His popularity would surely have been diminished without it.
Hawking once estimated he worked only 1,000 hours during his three undergraduate years at Oxford. “You were supposed to be either brilliant without effort, or accept your limitations,” he wrote in his 2013 autobiography, My Brief History. In his finals, Hawking came borderline between a first and second class degree. Convinced that he was seen as a difficult student, he told his viva examiners that if they gave him a first he would move to Cambridge to pursue his PhD. Award a second and he threatened to stay at Oxford. They opted for a first.
霍金曾经估计，他在牛津大学的三个本科阶段只工作了1000个小时。他在2013年的自传我短暂的历史中写道：“你本应该是才华横溢，而不是努力，或者接受你的局限。”在他的期末考试中，霍金在第一级和第二级学位之间出现了界线。他确信自己被视为一名难学的学生，于是告诉他的非凡的考官，如果他们先给他一个学位，他就会搬到剑桥攻读博士学位。他还威胁要留在牛津。他们选择了第一个。
Those who live in the shadow of death are often those who live most. For Hawking, the early diagnosis of his terminal disease, and witnessing the death from leukaemia of a boy he knew in hospital, ignited a fresh sense of purpose. “Although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying life in the present more than before. I began to make progress with my research,” he once said. Embarking on his career in earnest, he declared: “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.”
He began to use crutches in the 1960s, but long fought the use of a wheelchair. When he finally relented, he became notorious for his wild driving along the streets of Cambridge, not to mention the intentional running over of students’ toes and the occasional spin on the dance floor at college parties.
Hawking’s first major breakthrough came in 1970, when he and Roger Penroseapplied the mathematics of black holes to the entire universe and showed that a singularity, a region of infinite curvature in spacetime, lay in our distant past: the point from which came the big bang.
Penrose found he was able to talk with Hawking even as the latter’s speech failed. But the main thing that came across was Hawking’s absolute determination not to let anything get in his way. “He thought he didn’t have long to live, and he really wanted to get as much as he could done at that time,” Penrose said.
In discussions, Hawking could be provocative, even antagonistic. Penrose recalls one conference dinner where Hawking came out with a run of increasingly controversial statements that seemed hand-crafted to wind Penrose up. They were all of a technical nature and culminated with Hawking declaring that white holes were simply black holes reversed in time. “That did it so far as I was concerned,” an exasperated Penrose told the Guardian. “We had a long argument after that.”
There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark
对于坏掉的电脑来说，没有天堂或来生;对于那些害怕黑暗的人来说，这是一个童话故事
Stephen Hawking（斯蒂芬·霍金）
In 1974 he drew on quantum theory to declare that black holes should emit heat and eventually pop out of existence. For normal black holes, the process is not a fast one, it taking longer than the age of the universe for a black hole the mass of the sun to evaporate. But near the ends of their lives, mini-black holes release heat at a spectacular rate, eventually exploding with the energy of a million one-megaton hydrogen bombs. Miniature black holes dot the universe, Hawking said, each as heavy as a billion tonnes, but no larger than a proton.
His proposal that black holes radiate heat stirred up one of the most passionate debates in modern cosmology. Hawking argued that if a black hole could evaporate into a bath of radiation, all the information that fell inside over its lifetime would be lost forever. It contradicted one of the most basic laws of quantum mechanics, and plenty of physicists disagreed. Hawking came round to believing the more common, if no less baffling explanation, that information is stored at the black hole’s event horizon, and encoded back into radiation as the black hole radiates.
Marika Taylor, a former student of Hawking’s and now professor of theoretical physics at Southampton University, remembers how Hawking announced his U-turn on the information paradox to his students. He was discussing their work with them in the pub when Taylor noticed he was turning his speech synthesiser up to the max. “I’m coming out!” he bellowed. The whole pub turned around and looked at the group before Hawking turned the volume down and clarified the statement: “I’m coming out and admitting that maybe information loss doesn’t occur.” He had, Taylor said, “a wicked sense of humour.”
Hawking’s run of radical discoveries led to his election in 1974 to the Royal Society at the exceptionally young age of 32. Five years later, he became the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, arguably Britain’s most distinguished chair, and one formerly held by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac, the latter one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. Hawking held the post for 30 years, then moved to become director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.
Hawking’s seminal contributions continued through the 1980s. The theory of cosmic inflation holds that the fledgling universe went through a period of terrific expansion. In 1982, Hawking was among the first to show how quantum fluctuations – tiny variations in the distribution of matter – might give rise through inflation to the spread of galaxies in the universe. In these tiny ripples lay the seeds of stars, planets and life as we know it. “It is one of the most beautiful ideas in the history of science” said Max Tegmark, a physics professor at MIT.
霍金的开创性贡献一直延续到上世纪80年代。宇宙膨胀理论认为，刚刚起步的宇宙经历了一段极好的膨胀期。1982年，霍金首次展示了量子涨落——物质分布的微小变化——可能会通过膨胀导致宇宙中星系的扩散。在这些微小的涟漪中，我们所知的恒星、行星和生命的种子。麻省理工学院的物理学教授马克斯特格马克说：“这是科学史上最美丽的想法之一。”
But it was A Brief History of Time that rocketed Hawking to stardom. Published for the first time in 1988, the title made the Guinness Book of Records after it stayed on the Sunday Times bestsellers list for an unprecedented 237 weeks. It sold 10m copies and was translated into 40 different languages. Some credit must go to Hawking’s editor at Bantam, Peter Guzzardi, who took the original title: “From the Big Bang to Black Holes: A Short History of Time”, turned it around, and changed the “Short” to “Brief”. Nevertheless, wags called it the greatest unread book in history.
但这是一个短暂的时间简史，使霍金成为明星。这本书于1988年首次出版，在星期日泰晤士报的畅销书排行榜上保持了前所未有的237周，成为吉尼斯世界纪录的冠军。它售出了1000万册，并被翻译成40种不同的语言。一些人认为，在Bantam的编辑彼得古扎迪，他的原创标题是“从大爆炸到黑洞：一段短暂的时间”，把它扭转过来，把“短”变成“短”。尽管如此，瓦格斯称其为史上最伟大的未读书籍。
