Professor Stephen Hawking had a rather ambitious aim in life - to explain everything and find a theory that would predict the universe in the past and forever in the future, otherwise know as ‘the theory of everything’.
In July 2002, after decades of some of the most famous theoretical experiments in science, he admitted it could probably not be achieved.
But what he did do, amongst other things, was contribute massively to our understanding of black holes, one of the coolest yet most terrifying phenomena in the universe.
This, among all his incredible achievements, was arguably the single greatest contribution he made to the world of physics.
For regular non-theoretical physicists, his work can be explained a little like this...