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<\/a><\/center><\/p>\nProbably the most famous theoretical physicist and ALS victim of our time has passed according to Stars & Stripes<\/a>. Stephen Hawking lived an astounding 50 years after his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS – Lou Gehrig disease as it’s known in the US) in 1969. Many patients last only several months after the diagnosis.<\/p>\n A severe attack of pneumonia in 1985 left him breathing through a tube, forcing him to communicate through an electronic voice synthesizer that gave him his distinctive robotic monotone.<\/p>\n But he continued his scientific work, appeared on television and married for a second time.<\/p>\n As one of Isaac Newton’s successors as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Hawking was involved in the search for the great goal of physics \u2014 a “unified theory.”<\/p>\n Such a theory would resolve the contradictions between Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of gravity that govern the motion of large objects like planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the world of subatomic particles.<\/p>\n For Hawking, the search was almost a religious quest \u2014 he said finding a “theory of everything” would allow mankind to “know the mind of God.”<\/p>\n “A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence,” he wrote in “A Brief History of Time.”<\/p>\n In later years, though, he suggested a unified theory might not exist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n