Stephen Hawking 50p (2019)

The Stephen Hawking 50p did not circulate, so its value is set by how well a brilliant uncirculated coin has been kept. Coins still in the original Royal Mint pack sell for more than loose coins, capsule coins or coins in third-party cards. Scratches, carbon spots and handling marks on the reverse lower the price, as does a worn or torn pack. Silver proof, silver piedfort and gold proof editions were struck separately and trade in their own market.

The Stephen Hawking 50p was not issued for circulation, so it has no rarity rank.

The design is almost abstract: a black hole at the centre with curved lines swirling round it, the name STEPHEN HAWKING and a line of physics notation. Letters such as k, c, A and G in the formula are the quickest check. Turn it over for Queen Elizabeth II, with the year 2019. It was sold in educational packaging about black holes and was not released into circulation, so a loose one in change is a spent collector coin.

Stephen Hawking made his name with breakthrough work on black holes and became famous for explaining difficult ideas about space and time to a wide public. He died in March 2018, and The Royal Mint released this 50p in March 2019 to mark his life and work, presenting it as the first coin in a new series on innovators in science. That timing made Hawking only the third person in British history to be commemorated on a coin within a year of death, after Winston Churchill and the Queen Mother. Edwina Ellis designed the reverse, and the Hawking estate approved it. At the centre is a black hole, ringed by swirling lines set at angles so that space seems to bend around the event horizon. Across the design runs the Bekenstein-Hawking formula for the entropy of a black hole, S = kc³A/4ℏG, with his name, STEPHEN HAWKING. The obverse carries Jody Clark's fifth portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Innovation in Science set began with it, and the Rosalind Franklin 50p followed in 2020.