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Stephen Hawking's Thesis






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Younger Stephen Hawking
The Ph.D. thesis of the University of Cambridge
physicist Stephen Hawking was made freely available to read just this past month.

Stephen Hawking is known for his groundbreaking work involving black holes and relativity and is the author of several popular science books including 'A Brief History of Time', which has sold over 10 million copies.  He studied cosmology at the University of Cambridge.  At age 21, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Hawking completed his Ph.D. – entitled “Properties of expanding universes” – in 1966 when he was 24 years old.  Stephen Hawking's thesis deals with the implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe.  The 117-page paper was posted on the university’s open-access repository, which is already home to some 15,000 research articles and 2400 theses.  Hawking's thesis is the most requested item in the entire repository.  Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to "inspire people".  Within hours of Hawking’s opus being posted online, demand was so great that the site crashed.  However, according to the university, it was still downloaded more than 60,000 times in the first 24 hours.  On his thesis, it can be found that he wrote "This dissertation is my original work -S.W. Hawking".

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Abstract (found on the University of Cambridge's repository)

"Some implications and consequences of the expansion of the universe are examined. In Chapter 1 it is shown that this expansion creates grave difficulties for the Hoyle-Narlikar theory of gravitation. Chapter 2 deals with perturbations of an expanding homogeneous and isotropic universe. The conclusion is reached that galaxies cannot be formed as a result of the growth of perturbations that were initially small. The propagation and absorption of gravitational radiation is also investigated in this approximation. In Chapter 3 gravitational radiation in an expanding universe is examined by a method of asymptotic expansions. The 'peeling off' behaviour and the asymptotic group are derived. Chapter 4 deals with the occurrence of singularities in cosmological models. It is shown that a singularity is inevitable provided that certain very general conditions are satisfied."

Some of Hawking's thoughts on making his thesis freely available:

“By making my Ph.D. thesis open access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet"

"Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.”

“Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it.”


Here is his thesis: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251038



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