By Robert Barr, Associated
Press 04/20/2009
LONDON (AP) - Famed
mathematician Stephen Hawking was rushed to a hospital
Monday and was seriously ill, Cambridge University said.
The university said Hawking has
been fighting a chest infection for several weeks, and was
being treated at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, the
university city north of London.
"Professor Hawking is very
ill," said Gregory Hayman, the university's head of
communications. "He is undergoing tests. He has been unwell
for a couple of weeks."
Later in the afternoon, Hayman
said Hawking was "now comfortable but will be kept in
hospital overnight."
Hawking, 67, gained renown for
his work on black holes, and has remained active despite
being diagnosed at 21 with ALS, (amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis), an incurable degenerative disorder also known as
Lou Gehrig's disease.
For some years, Hawking has
been almost entirely paralyzed, and he communicates through
an electronic voice synthesizer activated by his fingers.
Hawking was involved in the
search for the great goal of physics - a "unified theory" -
which would resolve contradictions between Albert Einstein's
General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of
gravity that govern the motion of large objects like
planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals
with the world of subatomic particles.
"A complete, consistent unified
theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete
understanding of the events around us, and of our own
existence," he wrote in