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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.

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

SEE ALSO: Stephen Hawking makes one of his most famous research papers available online

"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."

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

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The site couldn't be reached when Mashableattempted to access it this morning.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Hawking wrote his thesis, entitled Properties of Expanding Universes in 1966 and recently gave his permission to make the document available. It quickly became the most requested item in the university's open access repository.

“By making my PhD thesis Open Access, I hope to inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet; to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos," Hawking said in a statement.

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