Stephen Hawking has broken the Internet - by people downloading his PhD thesis

Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis, ‘Properties of expanding universes’, has been made freely available to anyone, anywhere in the world, and in doing so crashed Cambridge's server.

A University of Cambridge spokesperson said: “We have had a huge response to Prof Hawking’s decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours.
“As a result, visitors to our Open Access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable.”

Professor Hawking said: “By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos. Anyone, anywhere in the world should have free, unhindered access to not just my research, but to the research of every great and enquiring mind across the spectrum of human understanding.

“Each generation stands on the shoulders of those who have gone before them, just as I did as a young PhD student in Cambridge, inspired by the work of Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Albert Einstein. It’s wonderful to hear how many people have already shown an interest in downloading my thesis – hopefully they won’t be disappointed now that they finally have access to it!”

Link to his thesis: (pdf) https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.11283

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 1

S27

How significant was this at the time?

Reply 2

Dez

60k downloads of a 30meg file is about 2 GB bandwidth, which is really not a lot. Cambridge's IT must be pretty basic. :erm:

Reply 3

Doones

Original post by S27

How significant was this at the time?

I'm not a physicist so don't really know, but his work on black holes is more significant.

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(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 4

Pidge Gunderson

Original post by S27

How significant was this at the time?

Pretty sure it wasn't that significant in comparison to other ones e.g. De Broglie's, which revolutionised the way people thought about particles.

Reply 5

username3186268

I’ve enjoyed reading it so far. Amazing when you realise he put it forward when he was just 24. The quality of PhD theses continues to amaze me.

Edit: some PhD theses, some you can read and it’s like a monkey wrote it but I guess that’s the pressure the students are under. Most however reflect the time and dedication put into it and really shows a scientists final masterpiece before they become fully qualified in the field.

(edited 6 years ago)

Reply 6

username521617

Original post by FriendlyPenguin

> Cambridge server crashed
> Internet broken

Servers crashing due to unpredicted traffic is pretty common, too.

Not to mention the phrase "breaking the internet" is just completely worn out and overused at this point.

"Check out this awesome thing (which you didn't hear about until now) that's breaking the internet! No. No it's not.

Reply 7

Notoriety

Original post by Lmacwilliam

Maybe his PhD thesis is rather good not because, relatively, modern students are poor. But because he would later become Lucasian Prof of Mathematics and he was quite a bright lad.

Reply 8

username3186268

Original post by Notorious_B.I.G.

Maybe his PhD thesis is rather good not because, relatively, modern students are poor. But because he would later become Lucasian Prof of Mathematics and he was quite a bright lad.

I wasn’t comparing the two. I was just saying 99% of theses are very good. There is though some exceptions. I wasn’t saying his was good comparatively as almost all theses are at that quality.