On Stephen Hawking's 80th birthday, Google created a special doodle to pay tribute

On the occasion of Stephen Hawking's 80th birthday, Google created a unique doodle on Saturday, January 8, 2022, to honour the theoretical physicist.

"Today's video Doodle celebrates one of history's most influential scientific minds, English cosmologist, author, and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking," Google said.

"From colliding black holes to the Big Bang, his theories on the origins and mechanics of the universe revolutionized modern physics while his best-selling books made the field widely accessible to millions of readers worldwide," the tech giant added.

Stephen Hawking's voice was also synthesised and used in the Doodle.

The 2:31-minute video was also published on Twitter by Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet.

On this day in 1942, Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England. From a young age, he was enthralled by the workings of the cosmos. His inquisitiveness and intellect had given him the moniker 'Einstein.'

Hawking, on the other hand, was diagnosed with a neurological condition at the age of 21 and opted to devote his life to physics, mathematics, and cosmology.

He defended his doctoral thesis, "Properties of Expanding Universes," at the University of Cambridge in 1965, which presented the revolutionary theory that space and time originated from a singularity, an infinitely small and dense point that is best known today as the key characteristic of black holes.