Stephen Hawking, Helium Production in an Anisotropic Big-Bang Cosmology 1 - Nature A Weekly Journal of Science, Volume 209, January 1 1966 to March 26 1966, London, Macmillan (Journals, Ltd, New York: St Martins Press INC, complete bound journals, petrol blue covering with gilt text to spine text , library label inside cover for 'Royal Naval College Library' and stamped 'WITHDRAWN', with first edition, first impression of Dr. Stephen Hawking and Dr. R. J Taylor’s paper: Helium Production in an Isotropic Big-Bank Cosmology [p.1278 – p.1279] and an early document on CERN titled CERN: An Opportunity in High-Energy Physics [p.839 – p.840], boards in fine condition with minimal wear to edges, spine good with some bubbling to covering,text very clean This issue of the journal, Nature, contains one of Stephen Hawking’s first pieces of published research, “Helium Production in an Anisotropic Big-Bang Cosmology”, dated March 1966. This is regarded as being where Hawking’s work began, while he was considering the helium content of the universe. Physics has a reputation for being difficult to understand for those of us not in the field, but even at this early stage, Hawking’s writing is surprisingly accessible. He manages to express the implications of his theorising in such a way that non-physicists can comprehend their magnitude. In this paper, Hawking proposes that the universe might not have always been isotropic (i.e., homogenous), as previously claimed. Rather, that “the universe was anisotropic when created but that the anisotropy rapidly disappeared in the expansion” (p.1278). Essentially, Hawking is arguing that not enough of the mass of the universe is taken up by helium for the big-bang to have been truly isotropic. Stephen Hawking CH CBE (1942-2018), a cosmologist who had difficulty reading until the age of eight and was told he would not live past the age of 23, grew up to become one of the greatest minds of our time. As a student at University College Oxford he was intellectually head and shoulders above his peers, and was known to correct the very textbooks his cohort were learning from. Hawking maintained an incredibly high output of work throughout his life, despite living almost his entire adult life with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).