The Times.
The astronomer royal was also among mourners at the funeral of the physicist who unlocked the universe
The Sunday Times
It was a funeral fit for British academia’s brightest star. Hundreds of Stephen Hawking’s family, friends and colleagues gathered in Cambridge yesterday to commemorate his life and work.
As the bell of St Mary the Great rang out 76 times for each year of his life, the church filled with a congregation that reflected the diversity of those whose lives he had touched. The mourners included Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking in the film The Theory of Everything, and Felicity Jones who played Hawking’s first wife, Jane.
Redmayne, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the scientist, took another role yesterday with a reading from Ecclesiastes, closing with the lines: “I have seen the business that God has given to the sons of men . . . he has put eternity into man’s mind.”
Outside the church the streets were packed by a crowd that had initially greeted Hawking’s cortege with respectful silence. Then, as his oak coffin was carried into the church by six porters from Gonville and Caius College, where Hawking was a fellow, the onlookers broke into prolonged applause.
Hawking’s children — Robert, 50, Lucy, 47, and Tim, 38 — followed behind the coffin, while waiting inside the church were the rest of the scientist’s family including his former wives, Jane and Elaine, along with friends and fellow academics.
One of the academics was Lord Rees of Ludlow, the astronomer royal. He shared Hawking’s atheism but gave his reading from Plato’s The Death of Socrates, reflecting on at least the possibility of an afterlife: “There is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things — either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.”
The main eulogy came from Robert, Hawking’s oldest child. The text was not released but in a statement he and his siblings said: “Our father lived and worked in Cambridge for over 50 years. He was an integral and highly recognisable part of the university and the city [so] we have decided to hold his funeral in the city that he loved so much and which loved him.”
Hawking’s body will be cremated at a private family ceremony and his ashes will be buried near the remains of Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey on June 15.
The cosmologist died peacefully at his home in Cambridge on March 14. Hawking had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease in his twenties and told that he was unlikely to survive into his thirties. Instead he not only lived into his seventies but, despite increasing disabilities, also helped to advance cosmology with new and profound insights.
His most famous formula, which Hawking wanted as his epitaph, described how black holes, once regarded as cosmological graveyards from which neither energy nor matter could return, radiated a special form of energy.
Hawking’s memory will live on in a different way — music. The service was accompanied by a performance of Beyond the Night Sky, composed by Cheryl Frances-Hoad and commissioned by Gonville and Caius as a gift for Hawking’s 75th birthday last year.
When he had heard the piece Hawking said that it had turned one of his core beliefs into lyrical form: “Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Perhaps I can be forgiven for saying that, tonight, I am wondering no longer.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/eddie-redmayne-and-lily-cole-among-stars-saying-farewell-to-stephen-hawking-xj3dfvklb?shareToken=9729874dae61977aabf222a07090b38d
