Eminent British physicist Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis on “Properties of expanding universe” has been accessed more than two million times from across the world within days of it being made public. Astonishingly, more than 500,000 people have tried to download the paper from the University of Cambride’s website. “This is far and away the most accessed item we have in the university’s Apollo repository,” said Arthur Smith, from Cambridge University in the UK.
Hawking’s 1966 work which was released by the University of Cambridge’s website last week proved to immensely popular so much so that the publication’s site of the website crashed as almost over 60,000 people were trying to access and download the physicist’s work. Hawking wrote the 134-page document as a 24-year-old postgraduate student while studying at the university.
Since the thesis went live last week, the PhD paper has been accessed about two million times by about 800,000 unique browsers “from every corner of the globe” while the next most read PhD thesis has just received 7,960 downloads since 2017. Previously, to read the doctor’s thesis one had to pay 65 pounds to the university’s library to scan a copy or go physically and read the copy in the library.
Stephen Hawking is also the author of the bestselling scientific books “A Brief History of Time” and “Theory of Everything”.
