Gregory Copeland - Who Was Stephen Hawking?

When World War II began in Europe in 1939, Frank and Isobel Hawking lived in London, England. London was heavily bombed during the war by Germany, which was fighting on the other side. Many parts of the city were destroyed. The Hawkings home wasnt hit, but one bomb landed just a few houses down the street from theirs.

When Isobel was pregnant with Stephen in the early 1940s, she moved for a time to Oxford, England. It was much safer in Oxford, which is about sixty miles away. Oxford is home to the University of Oxford. There were no soldiers or important factories there, so it was not a target for the Germans.

In the safety of Oxford, Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942. It was exactly three hundred years to the day after Italian physicist Galileo died. Stephen, who grew up to become a physicist, liked to joke that there was some significance to that. But he also admitted that thousands of other babies were born on that same day who didnt grow up to become famous scientists!

Frank Hawking studied medicine in college and became an expert in tropical diseases. He and Isobel lived in the Highgate section of London, where many scientists lived.

Stephen was Frank and Isobels first child. In 1943, they had a daughter named Mary.

Galileo Galilei is sometimes called the father of modern physics. During his lifetime, people believed that heavier objects fell at a faster rate than lighter ones. But Galileo found that objects in motion all fall at the same rate of acceleration.

Galileo was an expert in many subjects. He was an astronomer, a mathematician, a philosopher, and an engineer.

As a Roman Catholic, he angered church leaders by arguing that the Earth orbits the sun; at the time, most people believed the sun traveled around the Earth. In 1633, he was found guilty of heresy, which means going against the teachings of the church. He spent the last nine years of his life jailed in his own home.

Another daughter, Philippa, was born in 1946. The family adopted a baby boy named Edward when Stephen was fourteen years old.

In 1950, the family moved about twenty miles north of Highgate to Saint Albans. Frank had started an important job at the National Institute of Medical Research in Mill Hill, a town outside London. It was easier for him to commute to work from there.

In Saint Albans, the Hawking family sometimes stood out from their neighbors. Eight-year-old Stephen figured it was because not as many scientists lived in Saint Albans as in Highgate. That was true, but there were probably more things that made the Hawkings stand out.