(AP Photo/Zero Gravity Corp.)CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Free of his wheelchair and tethered only to heart rate and blood pressure monitors, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking fulfilled a dream Thursday of floating weightless on a zero-gravity jet, a step he hopes leads to further space adventures.
"It was amazing," Hawking said after the flight. The modified jet carrying Hawking, a handful of his physicians and nurses and dozens of others first flew up to 7,315 metres over the Atlantic off Florida. Nurses lifted Hawking and carried him to the front of the jet, where they placed him on his back atop a special foam pillow.
The jet then climbed to around 9,754 metres and made a parabolic dive back to 7,315, allowing Hawking and the other passengers to experience weightlessness for about 25 seconds.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=c6054588-4a2c-4272-805a-f81a8d78705a&k=97258
Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA, (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the runaway popular science bestseller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical discovery that black holes emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation). His scientific career spans more than 40 years and his books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and world-renowned theoretical physicist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking
