The ashes of renowned physicist Stephen Hawking were interred in Scientists' Corner at London's Westminster Abbey on Friday in a memorial ceremony attended by a mixture of celebrities and members of the public.
UK astronaut Tim Peake read a poem. Lucy Hawking, the physicist's daughter, and actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who played the physicist in the 2004 movie Hawking, read biblical passages. Nobel laureate Professor Kip Thorne and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees paid tribute to Hawking's work.
Following the service, Hawking's words, set to an original score by composer Vangelis, will be beamed into space by the European Space Agency.
Hawking died in March at age 76 after a lifetime of studying and theorizing about space and time. His final resting place lies between the remains of two other famed scientists, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton.
It is a rare honor to be interred at the Abbey, and one that has not been given to a scientist for almost 80 years. Before Hawking, the last scientists laid to rest at Westminster were atomic physicists Ernest Rutherford in 1937 and Joseph John Thomson in 1940.
This is the memorial stone which will be placed on top of #StephenHawking's grave. Incised in the stone is Hawking’s most famous equation describing the entropy of a black hole. pic.twitter.com/ClBhsXucVm
— Westminster Abbey (@wabbey) June 15, 2018