By ROGER HIGHFIELD - THE TELEGRAPH
Added: Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:31:56 UTC

Roger Highfield meets Prof Stephen Hawking, whose life and work is to be celebrated in a 70th birthday exhibition.

'A glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics': Stephen Hawking, 70 next week Photo: Murdo Macleod; MMP Cambridge

Stephen Hawking’s nurse offers me his hand to shake; it hangs limply as I take it. Even though he retains a youthful complexion, the devastating impact of the disease that has ravaged his body for almost 50 years is all too apparent. Yet I feel no pity – only awe.

It was in 1963, then a bright, ambitious, 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge, that Hawking was told that he had a type of motor neurone disease (today we know it as an atypical form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and was given about two years to live. His illness was degenerative: it would attack the nerves that controlled his muscles, affecting first his body, then eventually his mood, senses and thinking.

On Sunday, Hawking will celebrate his 70th birthday, and this week a conference will be held in his honour in Cambridge: the 27 invited speakers are world leaders in black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics. While his body was paralysed, Hawking used his mind to journey through the cosmos, glimpsing the origins of space and time. And that, indeed, is the story of his life: he is a man who has defied the laws of medicine in order to rewrite the laws of physics.

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TAGGED: PHYSICS