Hawking to be interred next to Isaac Newton

By Around the Web

(TELEGRAPH) — The ashes of Stephen Hawking will be interred next to Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, the first time a scientist has been afforded the honour in 80 years.

Professor Hawking will be the first well-known person to be laid to rest in the Abbey since Sir Laurence Olivier in 1989 and joins the likes of Charles Darwin, Elizabeth I, Charles Dickens and Geoffrey Chaucer.

The last scientist to be interred was the physicist Joseph John Thomson, the discoverer of the electron who died in 1940. Nuclear pioneer Sir Ernest Rutherford was also buried there three years earlier.

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