British physicist Stephen Hawking dies at 76

Bloomberg

Stephen Hawking, the British physicist and black-hole theorist who brought science to a mass audience with the best-selling book “A Brief History of Time,” has died. He was 76. Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge in England on March 14, a spokesman for his family said.
“We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today,” his children Lucy, Robert and Tim said in the statement. “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 humor inspired people across the world. 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 forever.”
A Cambridge University professor, Hawking redefined cosmology by proposing that black holes emit radiation and later evaporate. He also showed that the universe had a beginning by describing how Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity eventually breaks down when time and space are traced back to the Big Bang about 13.7 billion years ago.
“A Brief History of Time,” first published in 1988, earned its author worldwide acclaim, selling at least 10 million copies in 40 languages and staying on the best-seller list of the UK’s Sunday Times newspaper for a record 237 weeks.
Often referred to as “one of the most unread books of all time” for the hard-to-grasp concepts, it included only one equation: E = mc2 or the equivalence of mass and energy, deduced by
Einstein from his theory of special relativity. The book outlined the basics of cosmology for the general reader.