Stephen Hawking ’s ashes are to be lay to rest alongside the likes of Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton at Westminster Abbey in London , it has been harbinger .
The Abbey is the last resting piazza of many scientific luminaries , but Stephen William Hawking will be the first well - known public soul for nigh 30 years , and the first scientist for 80 years , to receive the honor .
Professor Hawkingpassed away on March 14 , aged 76 , having spent over 50 years refusing to countenance motor neurone disease prevent him from becoming the most famous skill communicator in the world , lease the wider world in thinker - flabbergast scientific discipline , or carrying out his ownground - breaking scientific study .
He join an telling list of fellow nifty idea . The last scientist to have been interred at the Abbey was physicist Joseph John Thomson in 1940 . Thomson expose the electron in 1897 and make headway the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 .
Three year before that pioneering physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford , the “ father of nuclear aperient ” , received the same purity . Rutherford famously was the first to dissever the corpuscle and receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 .
The Abbey ’s most famous occupant , in scientific circles at least – I ’m sure Elizabeth I , Geoffrey Chaucer , Rudyard Kipling , and Charles Dickens would have something to say otherwise – are of form Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin .
Newton , who once held the title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at his alma mater Cambridge , just like Professor Hawking , was buried in the Abbey in 1727 . Darwin was bury next to him in 1882 .
" It is entirely fitting that the corpse of Professor Stephen Hawking are to be buried in the Abbey , near those of magisterial fellow scientists , ” the Dean of Westminster , the Very Reverend Dr John Hall , said .
“ We believe it to be vital that scientific discipline and religious belief work together to attempt to answer the great questions of the whodunit of life and of the population . ”
Hawking was , of course , famously an atheist . “ God is the name people give to the reason we are here , ” he once toldTime powder store . “ But I guess that reason is the police force of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal family relationship . ”
But , as we have it away , Hawking had a wickedsense of humor , so maybe he ’ll enjoy it .
He also declared back in 2002 that he desire his most notable equation , describing the randomness of a black hole , engrave on his tombstone(a nod to Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann whose tombstone bear the inscription of his own entropy formula ) .
We will have to look to see if that happens though . Hawking will be interred at the Abbey following a thanksgiving service to be given later in the twelvemonth , after a private funeral with Quaker and family later this calendar month .
