Science's brightest star Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76

Stephen Hawking, who was dubbed one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Albert Einstein, died on what would have been Einstein's 139th birthday The famed physicist contracted motor neurone disease - a form of motor neurone disease that attacks the nerves controlling voluntary movement - in 1963 and was given two years to live. Remarkably, the then-21-year-old defied predictions overcoming its debilitating effects on his mobility and speech that left him paralysed and able to communicate only via a computer speech synthesiser. Hawking shot to international fame after the 1988 publication of A Brief History of Time, one of the most complex books ever to achieve mass appeal. He said he wrote the book to convey his own excitement over recent discoveries about the universe. In the late 1970s, Hawking declared that a black hole could only ever get bigger. The maths behind the claim was strikingly similar to the equation that underpins one of the fundamental laws of nature – which entropy, a measure of disorder, can also only increase.

Source: SBS