Death & Interment at Westminster Abbey

Stephen Hawking died peacefully at his home in Cambridge in the early hours of 14 March 2018, at the age of seventy-six. His children released a statement describing him as a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy would live on for many years. He had lived for fifty-five years beyond a diagnosis that had given him two.

A date with a certain symmetry

The timing had the kind of numerical neatness Hawking would have relished. He died on 14 March, which in the month-day convention is written 3.14, the first digits of pi, and so is celebrated each year as Pi Day. It was also the anniversary of the birth of Albert Einstein, the physicist whose theory of general relativity underpinned almost all of Hawking's own work. Having been born on the three-hundredth anniversary of Galileo's death, he now died on Einstein's birthday: a life bracketed, fittingly, by the giants of physics.

Tributes

The response was immediate and global, on a scale rarely seen for a scientist. Fellow physicists, world leaders, astronauts and millions of ordinary people paid tribute, not only to the discoveries but to what his life had represented: the triumph of a mind over a body that had failed it, and the proof that profound disability need be no barrier to the highest achievement. For a great many people he had been the face of science itself.

The funeral and the Abbey

Hawking's funeral was held on 31 March 2018 at Great St Mary's, the university church in Cambridge, near the college and department where he had worked for half a century. It was a private service for family, friends and colleagues, while crowds gathered outside.

Then, on 15 June 2018, his ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey in London, in a service of thanksgiving. He was laid to rest in the nave, beside the grave of Isaac Newton and close to that of Charles Darwin, an honour reserved for a very small number of the most significant figures in British history. The placement made a statement that needed no words: Britain regarded Hawking as belonging in the company of the greatest scientists it had produced.

His memorial stone carries an inscription of the equation for the temperature of a black hole, the Hawking temperature, drawn directly from the discovery of Hawking radiation that was his defining contribution. It is a rare thing for a scientist's own equation to mark their grave.

As part of the commemorations, the European Space Agency broadcast a specially composed message featuring Hawking's synthesised voice towards a distant black hole, a gesture both poetic and entirely in keeping with the man, sending the most famous voice in science out into the cosmos he had spent his life trying to understand.

What he left behind

Hawking's legacy runs along several lines at once: the physics, still shaping research today; the books that brought cosmology to millions; his advocacy for motor neurone disease research and disability rights; and the example of a life lived with humour and determination against extraordinary odds. Those threads are gathered on the legacy and honours page.

His resting place beside two other giants invites comparison; see Hawking vs Newton and Hawking vs Darwin.

His grave and other sites associated with him can be visited; see where to see Stephen Hawking.