“His name will live in the annals of science,” said Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal. Besides family and luminaries, the interment ceremony drew so many mourners that a thousand were chosen by lottery and 26,000 turned away. When Stephen Hawking died, in 2018, the abbey buried his ashes a few yards away from Newton’s grave. Medals bearing his likeness were struck in silver and bronze. He has led us to a new world.” An outpouring of verse filled the popular gazettes (“Nature her self to him resigns the Field/From him her Secrets are no more conceal’d”). In France the young Voltaire lionized him: “He is our Christopher Columbus. The world’s first scientist-celebrity, Isaac Newton, was entombed in Westminster Abbey with high ceremony, alongside statesmen and royalty, under a monument ornately carved in white-and-gray marble, bearing a fulsome inscription in Latin: “Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race!” His fame had spread far across the European continent. Stephen Hawking, Kings College, Cambridge, 1987
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