FAMILY, FRIENDS BID FAREWELL TO STEPHEN HAWKING
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| Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist, was famously an atheist |
Friends, family and colleagues of Stephen
Hawking gathered Saturday to pay their respects at his private funeral in
Cambridge, where the British science great spent most of his extraordinary
life.
Hawking,
who died on March 14 at the age of 76, was famously an atheist but his children
Lucy, Robert and Tim chose St Mary the Great, the church of Cambridge's
prestigious university, to say their farewell.
"Our
father's life and work meant many things to many people, both religious and
non-religious. So, the service will be both inclusive and traditional, reflecting
the breadth and diversity of his life," they said.
Tributes
poured in from around the world upon Hawking's death, from Queen Elizabeth II
to NASA, reflecting his huge impact as a physicist and an inspiration, in his
refusal to give up in the face of his crippling motor neurone disease.
The
funeral service -- being held a short distance from Gonville and Caius College
where Hawking worked for more than 50 years -- was only open to around 500
guests who knew him.
A private
reception was to follow at Trinity College.
A wider
audience will attend a thanksgiving service at Westminster Abbey in London on
June 15, when Hawking's remains will be buried near the grave of another
legendary scientist, Isaac Newton.
Actor
Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking in the 2014 biographical drama "The
Theory of Everything", was to give a reading from the Bible, followed by a
reading by Martin Rees, Britain's astronomer royal.
Eulogies
were to be delivered by Robert Hawking, the physicist's eldest child, and
Professor Fay Dowker, one of Hawking's former students.
An
arrangement of white lilies, to represent the universe, and another of white
roses as the polar star were to be placed on Hawking's solid oak coffin.
The church
bell was to toll 76 times, once for each year of Hawking's life, when his
coffin arrives.
New photographs
revealed
Ahead of the funeral, Gonville and Caius
College released new black and white photographs of Hawking taken in 1961 at a
summer school for young astrophysicists at a castle in Sussex, southern
England, when he was 19.
They
showed him playing croquet and in a sailing dinghy, two years before he began
experiencing the first symptoms of the motor neurone disease that would later
leave him almost completely paralysed.
Fellow
students contacted by the college recalled his left-wing views and his
mischievous sense of humour.
Hawking
defied predictions that he would only live for a few years, although his rare
condition -- amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) -- gradually robbed him of
mobility.
He was
confined to a wheelchair, almost completely paralysed and unable to speak
except through his trademark voice synthesiser.
But the
illness did nothing to dull his mind, and Hawking became one of the world's
best-known and most inspiring scientists, known for his brilliance and his wit.
His work
focused on bringing together relativity -- the nature of space and time -- and
quantum theory -- how the smallest particles behave -- to explain the creation
of the Universe and how it is governed.
But he was
also a global star -- his 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" was an
unlikely worldwide bestseller, and he appeared as himself in television shows
from "The Simpsons" to "Star Trek: The Next Generation".
Born on
January 8, 1942, Hawking died in his home in Cambridge.
After
taking his undergraduate degree at the University of Oxford, he moved to
Cambridge for his doctorate and stayed there for the rest of his career.
Hawking's
family has asked six college porters, many of whom provided support for Hawking
when he visited for dinners and other events, to carry his coffin.
SOURCE: AFP
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