So many people wanted to see Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis that they crashed the University of Cambridge website, where the thesis was posted publicly Monday for the first time.
More than 60,000 people accessed the 1966 thesis “Properties of expanding universes” in the first 12 hours after it was made open to everyone on the publications section of the university website just after midnight early Monday morning, The Telegraph reported.
The 134-page thesis was written by Hawking as a 24-year-old physics postgraduate, who would go on to be seen as one of the most brilliant physicists since Einstein. The average thesis gets under 100 views per month on the site.
"Visitors to our Open Access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable," a spokesperson from the university told Metro.
Prior to the thesis being made available online, readers had to access it from the Cambridge library or pay to have it printed out. It was the most requested item in the Open Access catalog, with the catalog entry alone getting a few hundred views each month, Phys.org reported.
"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," Hawking said, Phys.org reported. "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."
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