Stephen Hawking admitted to hospital

"Professor Hawking is a remarkable colleague," said Peter Haynes. "We all hope he will be amongst us again soon."

GLOBAL RENOWN

Hawking is renowned for his work on black holes, cosmology and quantum gravity. He achieved global recognition with the publication in 1988 of "A Brief History of Time," an account of the origins of the universe.

Hawking began suffering from motor neurone disease in his early 20s but went on to establish himself as one of the world's leading scientific authorities, and is constantly called upon to comment on new discoveries in astronomy and physics.

He raised his profile in popular culture with guest appearances in "Star Trek" and the cartoons "Futurama" and "The Simpsons." In 2007, he took a zero-gravity flight over the Atlantic Ocean in an adapted Boeing 727 jet.

Since 1974, the Oxford-educated scientist has worked on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics -- Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.

As a result of his research, Hawking proposed a model of the universe based on two concepts of time: "real time," or time as human beings experience it, and "imaginary time," the time on which the world may really run.

"The universe is self-contained, and without boundary, in imaginary time. However, in real time, the universe will appear to begin at the Big Bang (the explosion thought to be at the origin of the universe)," Hawking has said.

"The laws of physics will hold everywhere, so it is not necessary to believe that God intervened to set it going."