Stephen Hawking’s 1966 thesis goes online for the first time - and crashes Cambridge’s website

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Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking attends a photo call for a screening of the documentary Hawking, about the scientist's life, in Cambridge in 2013. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:58pm, 24 Oct 2017Updated: 1:21pm, 14 Mar 2018

Stephen Hawking’s 1966 doctoral thesis has crashed Cambridge University’s computer servers after becoming available to the general public for the first time.

Demand for the thesis, entitled Properties of Expanding Universes, was so great on Monday that it caused Cambridge’s repository site to go down. The site was still inaccessible at 7.30pm on Monday.

The “historic and compelling” thesis had swiftly become the most-requested item in Cambridge’s open access repository, Apollo.

The university made the essay public at midnight on Sunday to mark Open Access week after hundreds of readers sent in requests to download Hawking’s thesis in full.

British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking attends a launch event for a new award for science communication, called the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, in London, in this December 16, 2015 file photo. Photo: Reuters

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.”

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