Introducing Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is the world-famous physicist with a cameo in "The Simpsons on his CV", but outside his academic field his work is little understood. To the public he is a tragic figure - a brilliant scientist and author of the 9 million-copy-selling "A Brief History of Time", and yet confined to a wheelchair and almost completely paralyzed. Hawking's major contribution to science has been to integrate the two great theories of 20th-century physics - Einstein's General Theory of Relativity an…