Stephen Hawking was a determined scientist: Mumbai Professor Pankaj Joshi

“Even during his final days, Stephen Hawking must be thinking about the Cosmos” says Professor Pankaj Joshi as he is reminded about the time he spent with the maverick scientist. Joshi, 64, who works as a professor in department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research(TIFR), Mumbai remembers Hawking as a friendly and extremely determined scientist who fought all odds to continue his work in the field of Cosmology.

Joshi says that he was introduced to Hawking way back in 1974 as he  read his celebrated book “The Large Scale Structure of Space Time”. Inspired by his work in Cosmology, Joshi wrote to Hawking stating that he wanted to meet him. “I was pleasantly surprised after he agreed to meet. I was a post doctoral fellow then. Once we met, he asked me to come to Cambridge to work with him in the area” he says.

In 1983, Joshi went to the University of Cambridge and continued working with Hawking for a little less than a year. Hawking postulated that when massive stars which live only for a few crores of years undergo a gravitational collapse and end up becoming blackholes. While discussing his research, Joshi told him about his study in the area and introduced him to a new approach that he had come up with based on his research. “As per this approach, all big stars might not become blackholes and can instead reduce to an exploding fireball. When I told this to Hawking, he was impressed and praised my work on ‘naked singularities’ which was in the long run accepted worldwide by some of the top scientific journals”.

Joshi says that he later met Hawking in 2001 as he had visited TIFR for a conference on  String Theory. “Until today, no one thought that he would go so suddenly” he sums up.