Stephen Hawking
Stephen Hawking was told he had two years to live at 21. He went on to live for 55 more, rewrote black hole physics and starred in The Simpsons.
Published
Quick Facts
- Born
- 8 January 1942, Oxford, exactly 300 years after Galileo's death
- Died
- 14 March 2018, Cambridge, aged 76
- Known for
- Hawking radiation, black hole thermodynamics and the singularity theorems
- Best-selling book
- A Brief History of Time (1988), which sold over 25 million copies
- Cambridge post
- Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, 1979 to 2009
- Diagnosis
- Motor neurone disease, at the age of 21
- Studied at
- University College, Oxford, then Trinity Hall, Cambridge
- Resting place
- Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin
The student who barely opened a book
Before he became the world's most famous physicist, Hawking was a rather lazy undergraduate. At Oxford he later estimated he worked about an hour a day, and he took part in the college boat club as a cox, with a reputation for steering his crews into daring and occasionally damaging lines. His father, Frank, a medical researcher, wanted him to study medicine. Stephen wanted mathematics, which Oxford's University College did not offer at the time, so he read physics instead. He graduated with a first after an exam viva in which, as he told it, he made clear that if he got a first he would go to Cambridge, and if he got a second he would stay at Oxford. He was awarded the first. At Cambridge he began research in cosmology under Dennis Sciama.
Two years to live, then 55 more
In his early twenties Hawking noticed he was becoming clumsy. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given about two years to live. The news hit hard, but he later said it focused him. Around the same time he got engaged to Jane Wilde, and he began working properly on his PhD. In 1965 he married her, and they had three children: Robert, Lucy and Timothy. The disease progressed slowly. He moved from walking sticks to a wheelchair, and by the mid-1980s he lost his natural voice after a bout of pneumonia and a tracheotomy. He then communicated through a computer and speech synthesiser, first by squeezing a switch and later through a sensor on his cheek. The American-accented voice became so tied to his identity that he declined to replace it with a more natural one.
The black hole that wasn't quite black
Hawking's early fame came from working with Roger Penrose on singularities, showing that the universe's beginning in the Big Bang was consistent with Einstein's general relativity. His most celebrated insight came in 1974. Black holes were thought to swallow everything and give nothing back. Hawking showed that, once quantum effects at the edge of a black hole are taken into account, they should emit a faint glow and slowly lose mass. This became known as Hawking radiation. It has never been observed directly, because the effect would be vanishingly small for any real black hole. Even so, the idea is one of the great meeting points of general relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. It also raised the black hole information paradox, a puzzle that physicists are still arguing over. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, at 32, one of the youngest ever.
The book that nobody finished (but everybody bought)
A Brief History of Time appeared in 1988 and stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for over four years. It explained the Big Bang, black holes and the search for a unified theory for general readers. Hawking was told that every equation in a book would halve its sales, so he included just one: E = mc². The book became a cultural joke as well as a hit, widely bought and, according to the gag, rarely finished. Yet it brought cosmology into millions of homes and made Hawking a global figure. He later wrote more accessible books, including The Universe in a Nutshell and, with his daughter Lucy, a children's series starting with George's Secret Key to the Universe.
Pop star physicist
Hawking embraced popular culture with real enthusiasm. He appeared in The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, where he played poker with Newton and Einstein, and The Big Bang Theory. He also featured in a Monty Python sketch with Brian Cox's help. He was a keen bettor on scientific questions. He wagered against the existence of the Higgs boson and lost to Gordon Kane. He also made a famous bet with Kip Thorne over whether Cygnus X-1 contained a black hole, which he conceded in 1990. In 2007 he experienced weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight, which he described as a joyful experience. In 2012 he featured prominently in the opening ceremony of the London Paralympic Games, which were officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II. On the Cambridge side, his office was in the Centre for Mathematical Sciences, and he was a familiar sight on the city's streets in his wheelchair.
Where to find him today
Hawking died on 14 March 2018, Pi Day and Einstein's birthday. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey, between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The inscription on his memorial stone includes the equation for Hawking radiation temperature. In Cambridge, the Stephen Hawking Building stands at Corpus Christi College's Leckhampton graduate site. The Corpus Clock is outside the Taylor Library at the college's main site, and Hawking unveiled it in 2008. His legacy also lives on at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, which he helped found. His archive was acquired for Cambridge University Library, while the contents of his office, including wheelchairs and communication equipment, were acquired by the Science Museum Group.
Notable people
- Stephen Hawking
- Roger Penrose
- Dennis Sciama
- Jane Hawking
- Lucy Hawking
- Kip Thorne
- Isaac Newton
- Albert Einstein
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