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Stephen Hawking, the famed scientist for his research on relativity and black holes, has allowed open access to his 1966 doctoral thesis “Properties of expanding universes” over the internet.
The thesis comprised of 134 pages was written by Stephen when he was only 24 years old.
The thesis is the most demanded item at the Cambridge Library, as reported by library staff of the university. Since May 2016, 200 requests were earlier being received by the library, and the next most requested thesis was only demanded 13 times.
Readers were earlier paying $85 for a digital copy of Hawking’s thesis, or they have to visit the library, but now it’s free for download at the University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository Apollo.
The university made the essay public at midnight on Sunday to mark Open Access Week after hundreds of readers sent requests to download Hawking’s thesis over the website.
A University of Cambridge spokesperson said,
“We have had a huge response to Prof Hawking’s decision to make his Ph.D. thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours. As a result, visitors to our Open Access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable.”
Fancy a bit of light reading? We’ve put #StephenHawking‘s 1966 PhD thesis online to celebrate #openaccessweek https://t.co/bakmB4kRtl
— Cambridge University (@Cambridge_Uni) October 23, 2017
The users will have easy access to reach this scholarly article online which will empower students to learn the complex mechanism of expanding universes. The scientist is quite popular for his fact-based theories as he recently recommended that humans must leave earth within hundred years if they want to survive.
