A Giant on the Wheelchair

    He can neither move nor speak, nevertheless he is a highly regarded professor at Cambridge University in a field beyond the reach of most mortals（凡人），and his books are in the bestseller charts for weeks on end.

    Stephen Hawking is a phenomenon of小e modern era. Doctors gave him only a limited lifespan after he was diagnosed at the age of 22 with the incurable disease of the muscles and nervous system, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis.

    But he has defied their gloomy prognosis and turns 60 on Tuesday January $.Hawking's condition would be unendurably painful for most people. But the astrophysicist and cosmologist prefers to joke about it: at least he is not subject to the temptations of wasting his time jogging or playing golf, he says.

    And. more seriously. He is convinced that he has found -great happiness" in his life. Both personal and professional.

    He said discovering he had the de had not been the great blow many assume.

    "Before my condition had been diagnosed. I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be any-thing worth doing. " He once remarked“ I believe I'm hap-pier now.

    Hawking is not even able to adjust his spectacles, nevertheless he is sometimes referred to as "the master of the universe" Jane Wilde. Whom he married at the age of 25 after his fateful diagnosis - has seen it as her main task to remind him¨that he wasn't God".

    The temptation is understandable, as Hawking is. obsessed with the great imponderables(不可估计的) of science and humankind.

    "My goal is the complete understanding of the universe. why it is the way it is and why it exists at all," he once said．

    In other Words he aims to--“read God's thoughts".  Although.  As an atheist. He uses the term purely as a metaphor for the abstract laws of physics that are his daily companions.