Google's homepage featured an animated video honouring cosmologist, author
, and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on his 80th birthday.
The video follows Hawking's life and work, with a narration by the scientist himself,
approved by his family. Hawking, from Oxford, England, was
always fascinated by the cosmos.Upon diagnosis of neurodegenerative disease
at age 21, he became wheelchair bound. He lost his speech and began
communicating with a machine. Google calls him “one of science's most influential minds”.
Hawking earned a BA in Physics from Oxford and a PhD from Cambridge.
He was obsessed with black holes, which fueled his research. In 1974, he discovered that particles could escape black holes.