Physicist Stephen Hawking, 67, admitted to hospital

While surfing the net I came across this interesting article.
Physicist Stephen Hawking, the author of "A Brief History of Time" who is almost completely paralysed by motor neurone disease, has been urgently admitted to hospital.
Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to a local hospital in Cambridge, where he is a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics.
Hawking, who is only able to speak through a computer-generated voice synthesiser, had been ill for a couple of weeks, with his condition deteriorating since he returned from a trip to the United States at the weekend, a source said.
He cancelled an appearance at Arizona State University on April 6 due to a chest infection. A pre-recorded lecture was played to a science conference instead.
Hawking is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. He achieved global recognition with the publication in 1988 of "A Brief History of Time", an account of the origins of the universe.
Hawking began suffering from motor neurone disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world's leading scientific authorities, and is constantly called upon to comment on new discoveries in astronomy and physics.
Since 1974, the Oxford-educated scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics -- Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.
As a result of his research, Hawking proposed a model of the universe based on two concepts of time: "real time", or time as human beings experience it, and "imaginary time", the time on which the world may really run.
Motor neurone disease is a catch-all name for a family of muscle wasting diseases that includes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease in the United States.
Although Hawking is virtually paralysed, he has a slow-progressive form of the disease.
Hawking, who is due to step down as Cambridge's Lucasian professor of Mathematics when he turns 70, has been married twice. He has three children by his first wife.