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Stephen Hawking is widely believed to be the smartest living person on planet earth. He published his Ph.D. thesis ‘Properties of expanding universes’ all the way back in 1966, and until now that thesis was pretty hard to read. Until now, it wasn’t available online and to receive a copy you’d have to travel to the University of Cambridge and spend $85 for a scanned copy.
The University of Cambridge has now published Stephen Hawking‘s groundbreaking thesis work on their website and it’s free for everyone to read. The problem is this thesis is so f’n popular that it keeps crashing the university’s website. Both the BBC and TIME reported yesterday afternoon that the publishing of this thesis had taken down Cambridge’s website but I thought it would surely be back up by this morning, and it kind of was.
In fact, I had to click reload about 5 times before the web page would load. But, I was able to get Stephen Hawking’s ‘Properties of expanding universes’ Ph.D. thesis to load, all 134 pages of it, on the university’s free PDF web page after trying for a bit.
As of yesterday afternoon, over 60,000 people had already read Stephen Hawking’s thesis now that it’s available for free online but I’m guessing that number has more than tripled by now since the word is out.
Why now? Professor Hawking shared this about why he’s chosen to release his Ph.D. thesis for free after all these years (via BBC):
Prof Hawking said by making it available he hoped to “inspire people”.
He added: “Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.
“It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!” (via)
I guess I’ll get around to reading this at some point. It’s just a little hard to carve out time in my life to read 134 pages about the expanding universe when I’ve got a growing pile of books on my desk that I plan on reviewing, and my Instapaper archive of articles I haven’t had time to read yet is up to like 100-hours of reading. So I’m not exactly sure when I’ll have time to read this but I imagine it’ll be worthwhile when it’s the seminal work of the most gifted mind in the world.
You can find the University of Cambridge’s announcement about releasing the thesis here, along with a link to read that thesis in full.