Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis, the document that crashed Cambridge website

As soon as physicist Stephen Hawking’s doctoral thesis became available online, thousands of people immediately downloaded it — so much demand that it crashed the website that Cambridge University posted it on.

It’s not every half-century-old postgraduate scientific research paper that generates intense demand. But this one, in a win for scholarship and physics and knowledge for the sheer joy of knowledge, is sizzling.

“Properties of Expanding Universes,” which Hawking wrote when he was a 24-year-old graduate student in 1965, long before he became one of the world’s most famous scientists, is now available to all, with its faded typewriter-keystrokes and scrawled handwriting.

“We have had a huge response to Professor Hawking’s decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with almost 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours,” said Stuart Roberts, a spokesman for the University of Cambridge.

“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.”

Instead of illumination, researchers, students, and the simply curious who try to read it on the university’s Apollo open-access digital library are left with this:

This site can’t be reached
The connection was reset.

Try:

Checking the connection
Checking the proxy and the firewall
Running Windows Network Diagnostics
ERR_CONNECTION_RESET

A page from Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis (Image courtesy of Cambridge University)