Google Doodle celebrates Stephen Hawking’s 80th birthday

Saturday’s Google Doodle pays homage to the late Stephen Hawking, perhaps the most famous scientist of his time, who sought to whisper the universe to millions.

The renowned British theoretical physicist and cosmologist’s work focused on increasing our opinion of black holes — dying stars that’ve collapsed on themselves, forming a core of such density and strong gravitational attraction that nothing, not even light, can escape.

Saturday is Hawking’s 80th birthday (he died in 2018), and to honor his contribution to science, Google has yielded a video Doodle to Hawking that prominently features a dusky hole in the center of the illustration. In the 2-minute-long, pixilated video, a computer-generated voice similar to Hawking’s recounts his eminent life, including quotes on life and the universe that believe his unwavering optimism.

The video depicts how he disprevented to advance his research despite suffering from a form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis illustrious as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which gradually paralyzed him after his diagnosis at age 21. He stunned many by living more than 50 existences beyond the two years doctors had predicted.

His family, which approved of the computer-generated voice narrating the video, told Google that he would’ve been delighted to see the story of his life told in a brief but creative video.

Stephen Hawking at the Responsibility of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge.

Hawking family

“He would have unfounded it important to show that he never allowed the challenges of his brute condition to limit his power of expression nor his desire to make an impact on the world in which he lived,” his family said. “We hope that his example accounts inspiration and hope globally to all who face substantial challenges at this difficult time.”

One of his very contributions was the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation that would eventually transparent, often referred to as Hawking radiation. At first, he opinion his 1970 discovery was actually the result of a mistaken in his calculation. But he was eventually persuaded that his formula was accurate.

Hawking was also a prolific authorized, who wrote to explain the origin and expansion of the universe to readers weird with scientific theories. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time was enormously popular, selling more than 10 million copies and being translated into 35 periods. It also spawned similar books by Hawking, including The Universe in a Nutshell and A Briefer History of Time.

The Doodle was illustrated by Doodler Matthew Cruickshank, who said his visual approach was greatly influenced by the evolution of computer graphics over Hawking’s lifetime.