Stephen Hawking 50p: where to buy special edition coins

The Royal Mint has released a special edition 50p coin to commemorate the life and work of British physicist Stephen Hawking.

The Cambridge professor and author of A Brief History of Time died on 14 March last year at the age of 76, after a decades-long battle with motor neurone disease.

As the one-year anniversary of his death approaches, the Royal Mail has announced Hawking will be the first subject of its new Innovation in Science series, a collection of limited edition 50p pieces celebrating leading scientific figures.

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Edwina Ellis’ design for the coin, an optical illusion made up of a whirl of concentric circles, was inspired by the physicist’s pioneering work on black holes.

One of Hawking’s most important contributions to science was an equation demonstrating that the entropy of a black hole, “a measure of its internal randomness or disorder”, is dependent on its area, says the New Scientist.

This in turn led to the theory that “if a black hole can gain entropy from outside it, it should also be able to radiate some away into the universe”, a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation.

Black hole evaporation - a scenario in which Hawking radiation would eventually make a black hole disappear - “remains one of the most troubling and controversial ideas in cosmology”, says the website.

An uncirculated Stephen Hawking 50p can be purchased on the Royal Mail’s website for £10.

When the coin went on sale this morning, it proved “so popular the Royal Mint was temporarily forced to make people queue to visit its website”, while “eBay is already filled with limited edition versions of the coin going for well above the recommended retail price”, HuffPost reports.