ENTERTAINMENT
January 8, 2012 | By Sara Lippincott, Special to the Los Angeles Times
Stephen Hawking An Unfettered Mind Kitty Ferguson Palgrave Macmillan: 320 pp., $27 Today is Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday. It's an event worth marking, not least for its profound unlikelihood. As many even outside the physics community know, he learned about 50 years ago that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig's disease). He was given two years to live. However, at the time he was just coming into his own as a theoretical physicist, and he couldn't be bothered to die. Kitty Ferguson, a graduate of Juilliard and author of this intelligent and readable biography, "Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind," is astonishing in her own right.
SCIENCE
January 19, 2011 | By Eryn Brown and Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times
If some L.A.-area teachers wondered where their students were Tuesday, maybe they can blame Stephen Hawking. With his computerized voice, motorized wheelchair and an intellect that seems to leave mortal men far behind, Hawking is one of the best-known physicists ever. Die-hard fans, many of them youthful, started lining up early in the morning to get coveted free tickets to hear him speak at Caltech Tuesday night, school be damned. FOR THE RECORD: Stephen Hawking: A Jan. 19 article in LATExtra on a talk at Caltech given by physicist Stephen Hawking said he has a form of muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
ENTERTAINMENT
August 19, 1992 | KRISTINE McKENNA, SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
"Stephen's appeal has to do with the fact that he's otherworldly, but at the same time He's an everyman," says director Errol Morris of Stephen Hawking, the severely disabled theoretical physicist who is the subject of Morris' documentary film "A Brief History of Time," which opens Friday. "When you look at things with the scale of the cosmos in mind, his situation isn't much different from everyone else's.
SCIENCE
July 26, 2008 | John Johnson Jr., Times Staff Writer
For two decades, Stanford University physicist Leonard Susskind battled cosmologist Stephen Hawking over the behavior of black holes. Hawking said that when black holes eat their fill, they disappear, taking with them everything they consumed over their billions of years of existence. Susskind found this idea so disturbing that he publicly declared war -- a conflict he describes in his new book, "The Black Hole War."
NEWS
March 25, 1988 | BOB SIPCHEN, Times Staff Writer
The wheelchair whirred through the restaurant's double doors, tempting one diner to stare hard at its gnomish occupant. Unable to contain his curiosity, the young man stepped forward. "Dr. Stephen Hawking?" he asked, his voice charged with something like awe. Hesitantly he reached out to shake a hand unable to accommodate such formalities. "I want you to know, you have a fan club in this restaurant." Hawking's immobile right hand squeezed a gadget attached to a computerized voice synthesizer.
NEWS
June 6, 1990 | BOB SIPCHEN, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Two years ago a book called "A Brief History of Time" hit the top of the best-seller lists, and an unlikely new star in a wheelchair found himself rocketing past astronomer Carl Sagan to become king of the pop science cosmos. Since then, virtually every publication on the planet, from People to Playboy, has profiled theoretical physicist Stephen W. Hawking.