Source: University of Cambridge

Stephen Hawking’s Ph.D thesis, Properties of expanding universes, has been made accessible to anyone via the University of Cambridge’s Open Access repository, Apollo. The document is also available in high resolution on Cambridge Digital Library.

The 1966 doctoral thesis is the most requested item in Apollo with the catalog record alone attracting hundreds of views per month. In just the past few months, the university has received hundreds of requests from readers wishing to download Professor Hawking’s thesis in full. By making his Ph.D thesis open access, anyone can now freely download and read this compelling research by the then, little-known, 24-year-old Cambridge postgraduate.

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.”

While the university is committed to archiving all theses, it is often a struggle gaining permission to open up historic theses. With the online publication of Professor Hawking’s thesis, Cambridge now hopes to encourage its former academics — which include 98 Nobel affiliates — to make their work freely available to all.

Apollo is home to over 200,000 digital objects, including 15,000 research articles, 10,000 images, 2,400 theses and 1,000 datasets. The items made available in Apollo have been accessed from nearly every country in the world and in 2017 have collectively received over one million downloads.