Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was one of those rare old souls who seemed to be born already climbing, and his Sun in Capricorn tells you exactly why. Capricorn is Saturn's disciplined mountaineer, ambitious and patient, organising a whole life around mission and the long, dependable ascent to the highest rung. Hawking took that ladder all the way to the stars: from a first-class physics degree at Oxford to his doctorate at Cambridge, and eventually to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, one of the most storied posts in the world. He gave us the singularity theorems with Roger Penrose, and the astonishing insight that black holes are not wholly black at all but slowly glow with what we now call Hawking radiation. His Moon in Virgo speaks of a psyche that finds its peace in precision, in the meticulous nitty-gritty of the working out, in being genuinely useful to the world. Diagnosed at twenty-one with motor neurone disease, he lived and worked for more than fifty years past it, that Capricorn resilience refusing to yield. A Brief History of Time sat on the bestseller list for a record 237 weeks. He died in 2018, a mind that had made the universe feel a little closer to home.