Hawking’s PhD thesis accessed 2 million times globally

British physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking’s PhD thesis was accessed more than two million times “from every corner of the globe” within days of it being made available to the public, a media report said on Saturday.

Hawking’s 1966 work proved so popular on the day of its release on Monday that it crashed the publications section of Cambridge University’s website, the BBC reported.

More than 500,000 people have also tried to download the paper, titled “Properties of expanding universes”. Arthur Smith, from the university, called the figures “monumental”.

“This is far and away the most accessed item we have in the university’s Apollo repository,” Smith, deputy head of scholarly communication, told the BBC. “I’d hazard a guess that professor Hawking’s PhD thesis is also the most accessed item from any research repository ever. We’ve never seen numbers like this before.”

UCJ, UNILORIN.