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Stephen Hawking’s doctoral thesis, submitted in 1965, was made available for free download by the University of Cambridge in 2017. Hawking hoped to inspire people to question their place in the universe and make sense of the cosmos through open access to his work.
Stephen Hawking submitted his doctoral thesis, titled Properties of Expanding Universes in October 1965, when he was 23 years old. Two years earlier, he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, widely referred to as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease. Doctors had originally predicted that motor neuron disease would prove fatal to Hawking within a few years. But the theoretical physicist was still going strong five decades later when, in October 2017, the University of Cambridge made Hawking’s doctoral thesis freely available for download from its website. So many people tried to download the thesis on the first day it was published that the university’s servers were overwhelmed and temporarily blocked.
Free access to invaluable information:
Hawking has agreed to make the thesis available for free download in conjunction with Open Access 2017, a new initiative to make academic work more readily available to the public.
In a recent statement, Hawking said: “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world… to question our place in the universe and try to make sense of the cosmos.”
For decades, Hawking’s doctoral work – officially, Ph.D. 5437 – was kept on a shelf in Cambridge, available to anyone who wanted a digital copy for a library processing fee of £65 (about $85 USD). ).
