Stephen Hawking: I didn't learn to read until I was eight and I was a lazy student

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1322807/Stephen-Hawking-I-didnt-learn-read-8-lazy-student.html

By Niall Firth
Last updated at 1:11 PM on 23rd October 2010

Physicist Stephen Hawking has admitted being a lazy student

Physicist Stephen Hawking has admitted being a lazy student

He is regarded as having one of the brightest minds on the planet.

But eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has admitted that he did not learn to read until he was eight years old.

In a public lecture at the Royal Albert Hall, Professor Hawking also admitted that he was lazy while at Oxford University, where he studied physics, and that only the diagnosis that he might die young from motor neurone disease impelled him to concentrate on his work.

Professor Hawking said: 'My sister Philippa could read by the age of 4 but then she was definitely brighter than me.'

He said that he was unexceptional at school and was never further than halfway up his class.

'My classwork was very untidy, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers,' he said.

'But my classmates gave me the nickname Einstein, so presumably they saw signs of something better.'

Even though he gained a first-class honours degree from Oxford, Professor Hawking told his audience that had had been incredibly lazy while at university and had barely worked for an hour a day.

He said: 'I'm not proud of this. I'm just describing my attitude at the time, which I shared with most fellow students; boredom and feeling nothing was worth making an effort for.'

But he said that it was when doctors told him that he probably only had a few years to live at the age of 21 that galvanized him into focusing on his work and a period of productivity that resulted in some of his early breakthroughs.

He said: 'When faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realise that life is worth living and there are lots of things you want to do.'

Jim Al-Khalili, Professor Physics at the University of Surrey, who was at the event, said: 'I am certain that Stephen Hawking was destined to achieve great things in cosmology with or without his illness.

'While it must have been true that his diagnosis would have focused his mind, he could equally have chosen to leave physics and do something else entirely with what little time he thought he had left.'

Stephen Hawking with his first wife Jane,

Stephen Hawking with his first wife Jane, pictured in May 1974. The couple separated in 1991

Between 1965 and 1975, Professor Hawking developed the theory that black holes emerged after the Big Bang and developed a theory that collapsed stars radiate heat, which became known as 'Hawking radiation'.

Stephen Hawking is severely disabled by a type of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which has left him entirely paralysed.

He speaks using cheek muscles that activate predictive test software which is then translated into a synthesised voice.

His book about science and the universe for the layman, A Brief History of Time, was published on 1 April 1988 and made Hawking into a superstar of cosmology.

In his controversial new book , The Grand Design, Professor Hawking has claimed that modern physics leaves no room for a Creator - and that science could explain the origins of the universe.

The book, co-written by American physicist Leonard Mlodinow , sets out to contest Sir Isaac Newton's belief that the universe must have been designed by God as it could not have created out of chaos.

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