THE HINDU Editorial Vocabulary - March 15, 2018 - Topic 2

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Few scientists manage to break down the walls of the so-called ivory tower of academia and touch and inspire people who may not otherwise be interested in science. Stephen Hawking was one of these few. Judging by the odds he faced as a young graduate student of physics at Cambridge University, nothing could have been a more remote possibility. When he was about 20 years old, he got the shattering news that he could not work with the great Fred Hoyle for his PhD, as he had aspired to. 

Around this time he was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, an incurable motor neurone disease, and given two years to live. Not many would have survived this, let alone excelled in the manner he did. Luckily, the type of ALS he had progressed slowly, and over time he made many discoveries that marked him among the great physicists of his time. His first breakthrough was in the work he did for his PhD thesis. The expanding universe and the unstoppable collapse of a black hole under its own gravity present two extreme spectacles for the physicist to grapple with. Inspired by Roger Penrose’s ideas on the latter, Hawking came up with a singularity theorem for the universe. This work and its extensions, known as the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems, brought him international acclaim. Later, along with others he formulated the laws of black hole mechanics, which resemble the laws of thermodynamics. Thinking along these lines led him to a contradiction — that this theory predicted that black holes would exude radiation, whereas in a purely classical picture nothing could escape the black hole, not even light. He resolved this contradiction by invoking quantum mechanics. The radiation of the black hole was named Hawking radiation.

There is no doubt that with Hawking’s death the world has lost an outstanding scientist. But he was not only a pathbreaker in the world of science. He came to be known to millions with the publication of A Brief History of Time, his best-selling book describing in non-technical terms the structure, development and fate of the universe. He ranks with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein as that rare physicist who fired the popular imagination. However, while Newton and Einstein worked on broad canvases, Hawking was focussed on cosmology and gravitation. His was a life that carried to the public not only the secrets of the cosmos but also the promise of hope and human endeavour; he showed that disability need not hold a person back in the pursuit of his dreams. He leaves behind a wealth of knowledge, and also the conviction that the will to survive can overcome all odds.

Vocabulary

Possibility: a thing that may happen or be the case.

Example: The theoretical possibility of a chain reaction

Synonyms: chance, likelihood, probability, hope, risk, hazard, danger, fear

Antonyms: impossibility, impossibleness

Aspire: direct one's hopes or ambitions toward achieving something.

Example: We never thought that we might aspire to those heights

Synonyms: desire, hope for, dream of, long for, yearn for, set one's heart on

Diagnose: identify the nature of an illness or other problem by examination of the symptoms.

Example: Doctors diagnosed a rare and fatal liver disease

Synonyms: identify, determine, distinguish, recognize, detect, pinpoint

Breakthrough: a sudden, dramatic, and important discovery or development.

Example: A major breakthrough in DNA research

Synonyms: advance, development, step forward, success, improvement, discovery

Grapple: engage in a close fight or struggle without weapons

Example: Passersby grappled with the man after the knife attack

Synonyms: wrestle, struggle, tussle, brawl, fight, scuffle, battle

Formulate: create or devise methodically a strategy or a proposal

Example: Economists and statisticians were needed to help formulate economic policy

Synonyms: devise, conceive, work out, think up, lay, draw up, put together

Predicted: say or estimate that a specified thing will happen in the future or will be a consequence of something.

Example: It is too early to predict a result

Synonyms: forecast, foretell, foresee, prophesy, anticipate, tell in advance, envision

Antonyms: assure, calculate, demonstrate, determine, establish

Pursuit: the action of following or pursuing someone or something.

Example: The cat crouched in the grass in pursuit of a bird

Synonyms: striving toward, quest after/for, search for, aim, goal, objective

Conviction: a firmly held belief or opinion.

Example: His conviction that the death was no accident

Synonyms: belief, opinion, view, thought, persuasion, idea, position

Antonyms: acquittal