London, March 14 (RHC)--World renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has died at the age of 76. He died peacefully at his home in Cambridge in the early hours of Wednesday, his family said.

The British scientist was famed for his work with black holes and relativity, and wrote several popular science books including A Brief History of Time.

At the age of 22 Hawking was given only a few years to live after being diagnosed with a rare form of motor neuron disease.

The illness left him in a wheelchair and largely unable to speak except through a voice synthesizer.

The physicist was the first to set out a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics.

He also discovered that black holes leak energy and fade to nothing - a phenomenon that would later become known as Hawking radiation.

Through his work with mathematician Roger Penrose he demonstrated that Einstein's general theory of relativity implies space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.