Stephen Hawking, a Physicist Transcending Space and Time, Passes Away at 76

Published: March 15, 2018, 4:31 p.m.

For arguably the most famous physicist on Earth, Stephen Hawking\u2014who died Wednesday in Cambridge at 76 years old\u2014was wrong a lot. He thought, for a while, that black holes destroyed information, which physics says is a no-no. He thought Cygnus X-1, an emitter of X-rays over 6,000 light years away, wouldn\u2019t turn out to be a black hole. (It did.) He thought no one would ever find the Higgs boson, the particle indirectly responsible for the existence of mass in the universe.