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THEORETICAL
PHYSICIST
STEPHEN HAWKING
KARI CORNELL
Lerner Publications
Minneapolis
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To Will. May you always have that extraordinary sense of wonder .
Copyright 2016 by Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the prior written permission of Lerner Publishing
Group, Inc., except for the inclusion of brief quotations in an acknowledged review.
Lerner Publications Company
A division of Lerner Publishing Group, Inc.
241 First Avenue North
Minneapolis, MN 55401 USA
For reading levels and more information, look up this title at www.lernerbooks.com.
Content consultant: Liliya L. R. Williams, Professor, Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cornell, Kari, author.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking / by Kari Cornell.
pages cm. (STEM trailblazer bios)
Audience: Ages 711.
Audience: Grades 4 to 6.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4677-9528-9 (lb : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4677-9717-7 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4677-9718-4 (eb pdf)
1. Hawking, Stephen, 1942Juvenile literature. 2. PhysicistsGreat BritainBiography
Juvenile literature. 3. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosisPatientsGreat BritainBiography.
4. CosmologyJuvenile literature. I. Title. II. Series: STEM trailblazer bios.
QC16.H33C67 2016
530.092dc23 [B] 2015021774
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 BP 12/31/15
The images in this book are used with the permission of: iStockphoto.com/Adventure_Photo,
p. ; Mary Evans Picture Library/Courtesy Everett
Collection, p. ; myLoupe//Universal Images Group/Getty
Images, p. ;
John Hedgecoe/TopFoto/The Image Works, p. ; Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty
Images, p. ;
David Gamble/TopFoto/The Image Works, p. ; Local World/Rex
USA, p. ; Focus Features/Courtesy Everett
Collection, p..
Front cover: Mike Marsland/WireImage/Getty Images (main); NASA, ESA, and E. Sabbi/ESA/
STScI (background).
Main body text set in Adrianna Regular 13/22. Typeface provided by Chank.
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CONTENTS
Honors, Opportunities,
and Challenges
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Chapter 1
As a child,
Stephen Hawking
loved gazing at
the night sky.
O n a warm summer evening in the early 1950s, young
Stephen Hawking lay in the grass in front of his home in
Saint Albans, England, and gazed up at the stars. His mother
and his younger sisters were there too. As the damp grass
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tickled their toes, they took turns pointing out groupings of stars
called constellations. Sometimes, they even saw falling stars.
Looking at the stars was one of Stephens favorite things
to do. But he also spent a lot of time thinking about stars. He
wondered how the stars had come to be and if they would
ever fade away. He didnt know it then, but he would spend
his life searching for answers to these questions and many
others. Stephen would become a theoretical physicist . Thats
a scientist who uses math to study ideas about how the
universe began and how it might change in the future.
Hawking
suffers from
a motor neuron
disease, but it has not
slowed his efforts to
learn about the
universe.
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