Many people think of science as a collection of facts and ideas about the world around us. But science is more than of how human beings have brought their individual strengths and weaknesses to the ever going struggle to learn more about our world. Stephen Hawking is one of the best-known and most admired scientists in the world today. His life and work have been featured in numerous newspaper and magazine articles, television documentaries, and even a movie. Part of Hawking's fame comes from his ability to use his imagination or intuition to see connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. He has combined the physical laws governing suns and galaxies with those governing the particles inside the atom. He has created a chain of thought that links events inside collapsing stars with the almost unimaginable explosion that, most scientists believe, began our universe about fifteen billion years ago (Boslough).
             In early 1942, Great Britain was in the third year of a bitter struggle for survival. England had been spared from invasion, but night after night, German bombers continued to pound London. Frank and Isobel Hawking were expecting their first child. The Hawkings were well-educated and talented. Both had attended the university at Oxford. The couple realized that London was an unsafe place to raise a child, and decided to move to Oxford which Germany had agreed not to bomb in return for the British not bombing Heidelberg and Gøttingen. Stephen Hawking once noted that he "was born on January the 8th, 1942, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo."
             World War Two changed the way people looked at scientists and their theories. Suddenly the incomprehensible ideas of physics had become very important. The laws of gravity and motion, discovered centuries earlier by Sir Isaac Newton, now enabled warring nations to aim and launch rockets and new jet airplanes that would soon break ...