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Hawking Estate Donates Physicist’s Property in Lieu of U.K. Tax

Posted on June 1, 2021

The estate of the late physicist Stephen Hawking has donated the scientist’s papers and other materials, including scripts for The Simpsons television program, to museums in lieu of paying £4.2 million in U.K. inheritance tax.

Hawking died in 2018 after suffering from motor neuron disease his entire adult life.

On May 26 the Cambridge University Library said it will receive approximately 10,000 pages of Hawking’s scientific and other papers. The Science Museum in London said it will take possession of the entire contents of the famed physicist’s office, including Hawking’s motorized wheelchairs, voice synthesizing equipment, and personal reference library.

The Guardian reported May 26 that the donation to the Cambridge University Library will offset £2.8 million of inheritance tax liability, while the contribution to the Science Museum will settle £1.4 million of tax owed by the estate. It’s not clear if there are any additional amounts of inheritance tax owed by the estate.

According to Arts Council England, an estate that sells an object valued at £100,000 to settle a tax liability would generally be subject to inheritance tax at a rate of 40 percent. If the estate offers the same object under the acceptance-in-lieu program, 25 percent of the tax that would have been payable, or £10,000, would be remitted to the estate. “An object is, therefore, worth around 17 percent more if it is offered in lieu of tax than if it is sold on the open market at the same price,” the Arts Council said in a posting on its website.

While Hawking achieved celebrity status with the publication of A Brief History of Time, his 1998 bestseller about the origins of the universe, he became familiar to an even broader audience through his four appearances in an arguably less cerebral vehicle, The Simpsons animated television series. In a 2010 interview with The Guardian, Hawking was asked what he thought was the most common misconception about his work. “People think I’m a Simpsons character,” he replied.

The Cambridge University Library said it will receive the scripts from those performances. The library will also obtain copies of well-publicized wagers made by Hawking, including one from 1974 in which he bet a fellow cosmologist a year’s subscription to Penthouse magazine that an X-ray source in the Cygnus constellation would not turn out to be a black hole. In his 1990 acknowledgment that he had lost the bet, Hawking said he had made it because much of his research would have been invalidated if it were proved that black holes didn’t exist, but he would at least have had the consolation of winning the wager.

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