Hawking suffers from an unusual early-onset and slow-onset amyotrophic lateral sclerosis of the spinal cord, commonly known as gradual freezing. The disease began in Hawking's last year at Oxford University. At this time, he found his movements more and more clumsy, often wrestling for no reason, and rowing became more and more difficult.
Once, he fell down the stairs and landed on his head first, causing a slight temporary amnesia. At Cambridge University, the situation got worse, and his speech was a bit vague. Hawking's parents also noticed his health problems and took him to see an expert. The doctor diagnosed him with gradual freezing.
Extended data:
Hawking's achievements
Stephen william hawking is one of the great men with international reputation in this century, a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of Cambridge University, and the most important contemporary general relativity and cosmologist. Lucas Lecture on Mathematics at Cambridge University, UK, which is the highest honor lecture in the history of natural science after Newton and Dirac.
In 1970s, together with Penrose, he proved the famous singularity theorem. For this reason, they all won the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1988. He is therefore known as the most famous scientific thinker and the most outstanding theoretical physicist in the world after Einstein.
The black hole theory perfectly unifies quantum theory and thermodynamics in Hawking's radiation. The borderless quantum cosmology he proposed in 1980s solved the "first push" problem that puzzled the scientific community for hundreds of years.