A definitive biography of a remarkable man and a brilliant scientist.Scarcely able to move or speak as a result of motor-neuron disease, Hawking has vastly expanded our scientific knowledge and made his discoveries accessible to the layperson in his bestselling book A Brief History of Time.Stephen Hawking is perhaps the most famous scientist since Einstein. Although his body is confined to a wheelchair, his brilliant work on black holes, the Big Bang, and quantum cosmology has already guaranteed his reputation as a towering figure in modern physics. This superb biography interweaves the events of Hawking's life with concise and cogent explanations of the theories that have brought us breathtakingly close to piercing the ultimate mysteries of time, space, and matter. It tells the story of Hawking's days at Oxford and of the early warning signs of the terrible disease that has made him dependent on a voice synthesizer to communicate his epochal discoveries. It shows us his emergence as the hugely successful author of the best-selling A Brief History of Time , an unexpected triumph that saved him from a financial “black hole” and brought him worldwide celebrity. And it describes the dissolution of his marriage of many years. Revealing yet ultimately admiring, Stephen Hawking is a master portrait of the man who is destined to be remembered as the most important scientist of the modern era.