Hawking says 'look up at stars'_美文_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Hawking says 'look up at stars'

When as a bright and enthusiastic 21-year-old he was diagnosed with the disease, doctors told him he would probably not make it beyond the age of 23.

"At first I became depressed," Hawking said. "There didn't seem to be any point working on my PhD because I didn't know if I would live long enough to finish it."

Yet in the almost half a century since, Hawking has broken new frontiers research into theories of time, space, relativity and black holes. He is often hailed as a modern-day Einstein and his work has shed light on the origin of the cosmos, the nature of time, and the ultimate fate of the universe.

Currently the director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge, Hawking also founded the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology and only recently retired from a post known as the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, a title once held by Isaac Newton.

Looking back on his life and work in the speech entitled "A Brief History of Mine", Hawking saidit had been a "glorious time" to be alive and be researching theoretical physics.

The 70-year-old urged fellow researchers and cosmology enthusiasts to encourage public interest in space and to keep going there to witness what he described as the "uninterrupted views of our vast and beautiful universe".