The physicist Stephen Hawking was in hospital on Monday night after becoming “very ill” at Cambridge University earlier that day.
Hawking, 67, was taken by ambulance to the nearby Addenbrooke’s hospital for tests and was said to be in a “comfortable” condition. He has been unwell for the past couple of weeks.
Earlier this month, the grandfather and father-of-three pulled out of a headline appearance at a science conference in Arizona to recover from a chest infection.
“Professor Hawking is very ill and has today been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke’s hospital, Cambridge,” a university spokesman said on Monday. “He is undergoing tests. He has been unwell for a couple of weeks.”
Hawking, who rose to wider public prominence in 1988 with the publication of his bestselling A Brief History of Time, began to develop the symptoms of incurable motor neurone disease in the 1960s, gradually losing the use of his limbs and voice.
He has worked at the university’s department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics for more than 30 years, but is due to step down as Lucasian professor of mathematics, a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton, at the end of the academic year. It is customary to retire from the post at 67, though Hawking intends to continue as professor emeritus.
In a career spanning almost 50 years, Hawking has wrestled with some of the most puzzling questions in cosmology. With Sir Roger Penrose, at Oxford University, he used the physics of collapsing stars to argue that space and time could begin at points in the universe called “singularities.”
In a lecture he gave in 2007 in honor of NASA’s 50th anniversary at George Washington University in Washington, Hawking suggested primitive alien life might be common.
In 2007, Hawking became the first disabled person to experience weightlessness aboard a Boeing 727 that replicates the freefall conditions of being in orbit. The plane, which flew from NASA’s Cape Canaveral site in Florida, performed eight steep dives over the Atlantic, allowing the physicist to float freely for 25-second spells.
Hawking has since signed up to fly to the edge of space next year as one of Sir Richard Branson’s first space tourists aboard the Virgin Galactic spacecraft.
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