Stephen Hawking's thesis causes Cambridge University website to crash

News that the University of Cambridge made Stephen Hawking's seminal doctoral thesis (on how universes expand) publicly available sent positive shockwaves out to physics fans around the world.

The response has been so overwhelming that the number of people trying to access the thesis actually crashed Cambridge University's open access repository site.

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"We have had a huge response to Professor Hawking's decision to make his PhD thesis publicly available to download, with 60,000 downloads in less than 24 hours," a spokesperson for the University of Cambridge said in a statement to Mashable. "As a result, visitors to our open access site may find that it is performing slower than usual and may at times be temporarily unavailable."

The spokesperson added that 409,977 people have viewed the repository page with the thesis since the announcement yesterday.