<p>LBS/DRI/29/12/04</p><p>PROFILE / STEPHEN HAWKING</p><p>Professor Steven Hawking turned us on to the universe. “ He’s meddling away at the frontiers and long may he continue to do so.At 21 he was diagnosed with a fatal illness Mother of S H : “ At that time, they said to him you’ve got to live about two and a half years.” But in a constant battle against disease, Hawking wrote the best seller of the eighties.</p><p>“ The fact that he was doing this from a wheelchair and you know, hardly able to move in other respects is very remarkable.”</p><p>The world’s most famous living scientist</p><p>Interview of a student: “ He does have a very powerful image. And it is just amazing to see him in real life.” “ He is in the vanguard, he is the first, he is the best, you know he is the one by which all others are measured.”</p><p>Since this beautiful telescope was built, over 150 years ago, astronomy has come a long, long way. It’s here, in Cambridge where I first started my career in studying the universe. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a revolution in our understanding of the cosmos. Contributing to that revolution has been Cambridge physicist, Stephen Hawking . I went to visit Hawking in the center for mathematical studies. “ Stephen hi ! great to see you again. How are you ?” “Hello. I’m fine, thanks.” He uses a computer to generate the thoughts he wants to communicate. I asked him about his life and career and his cosmic concerns. “ I have made a proposal of the origin of the universe. It’s looking good.”</p><p>Hawking spends his life trying to answer some of the biggest questions in theoretical physics. Unlike some scientists, he’s comfortable sharing his ideas with the public. At the Cambridge union, he attracts an appreciative crowd of students to a lecture on the dimensions of space and time. “ I want to describe an exciting new development that made our former views of the universe and of reality itself, whatever that may be. The idea is that we may be living on the brink or surface in a lighter space….” Despite the challenges of his daily life, Hawking is a communicator, lecturing, teaching and researching into the mathematical conundrums of the universe. He lives with his second wife Elaine, who he married in 1995. Hawking has recently published a sequence to the book that made his name, lavishly illustrated, its abstract ideas and esoteric concepts bring him closer to uncovering a theory of everything in the universe. But how could someone whose life has been so physically confined be capable of such extraordinary visions ? Hawking’s remarkable career in science began as a schoolboy in St Albans. He was bright, but no child prodigy, according to his classmates at St Albans’school. “ He was one of the bright boys in the class, 3A, which was a very bright class indeed. I became friendly with him and his little gang, most of them were scientists and they used to</p><p>1 spend a great deal of time reading and discussing and making things, I mean they made radios of course, and they made record players and they worked on electrical things, and of course a little later he made a very early computer.” Born in 1942, the young Hawking was raised by parents who expected him to succeed in academic life. Stephen, what was it about your upbringing that made you so fascinated about the universe ? “ My father was a research scientist in optical medicine, so I grew up thinking a research scientist was the natural thing to be, but I felt medicine was too disruptive and emphasized, so I chose physics, the most fundamental of the sciences.” He won a scholarship to University College Oxford where he read maths and physics, but he also learned to enjoy himself. Interview of Hawking’s mother : “I think Stephen was a very normal young man. He liked parties, he liked pretty girls, only pretty ones, he liked, he liked a binger. And he did to some extent like work.” I saw him at Gaden, quite a lot at Oxford, and there, he’d emerged, as a raffish, drinking type who used drugs. Without having to do too much work at Oxford, Hawking got a first. He decided to study cosmology and was offered a place at Cambridge to do a PhD, but the hopes of a bright future would soon be chattered. Mother : “He wasn’t very well during his first term at Cambridge, and then, he came back and it was a cold winter, and we went skating, and that was when he fell and couldn’t get up.” After extensive tests, he was diagnosed with a form of motor-neuron disease. “ The whole family was in shock, and we had, that was just before his 21st birthday. I went to see his doctor who just more or less said there is no cure for this disease., and no treatment for this disease, which was perfectly true but not very encouraging. In fact there’s quite a lot you can do for motor-neuron disease, but at that time, people didn’t really know about it. It was not, I think everybody took it for granted that anybody having this disease was going to live 2 years or so.” How did you feel at that time ? How did you feel about this diagnosis ? Stephen Hawking : “ I was never actually sure that I had only two years to live, but I could see the doctors didn’t think my prognostic was good. In a situation like that, what can one do but carry on and do the best one can.” Amongst his friends at Cambridge was a young chemist, Robert Donovan. “ When I first met Stephen, he was already having some difficulties walking, and of course it gradually got more difficult. First of all he had to take a walking stick and later of course, the wheelchair, but the impressive thing was the way he was determined for as long as possible to keep going.” In 1963, Stephen met Jane Wild at a party in St Albans. In spite of the prognosis, they decided to marry. Mother : “ It was about a year, a year and a half before they got married, and I must say both families were rather discouraging, because, well Jane was very young you see, and her father didn’t much like the idea, understandably and we didn’t like the idea because we thought that she was too young and couldn’t understand the thing properly. And she wasn’t medical, and it was very hurtful .” “It wasn’t a very difficult decision to take to marry Stephen, because, I think a lot of people have forgotten that at that time, everyday one read reports in the newspapers that a nuclear war was likely to break out in the next year or two. People were saying they weren’t going to have children because there was going to be a nuclear war, so it looked as though all our lives were going to be really curtailed. The fact that Stephen had been diagnosed as having only a</p><p>2 couple of years to live didn’t really seem to be very much different. This situation was facing the rest of us anyhow.” But within a few years of the wedding, the gloom was lifting. Stephen Hawking : “I found to my surprise that things were going rather well. I got married, had three children, and my scientific work took off in a spectacular way. The disease had progressed, but slower than anyone expected.” Another source of optimism was in cosmology itself. Radio telescopes were searching for evidence of how the universe began. In Cambridge, giant dishes could look back to a much earlier era of the universe. They discovered that the cosmos was more crowded in the past, throwing doubts on the theory that it had always existed. Later an antenna in New-Jersey detected an radiation that could only have come from an explosive start of the universe, a big bang. Hawking worked out that the key to understanding the big bang lay in an equally bizarre phenomenon, black holes. One of the former experts on black holes in mathematician Roger Penrose who Hawking began to work with. Penrose predicted that at the heart of a black hole is a so-called singularity, a point of infinite density and zero size. “The question of a singularity inside a black hole was something that I addressed by kinds of methods that people hadn’t used before in the subject. Hawking had an inside view in the problem with regard to cosmology because he took the idea that a black hole collapsing to a point and realized that it was really like a backwards version of the big bang, the big bang is everything expanding from a point to form a whole universe.” Hawking’s master stroke was to realize that both space and time were created in the big bang. “I think my achievement has been to help to show that time as we know it has a beginning in the big bang, and an end in black holes and to investigate what happens in these places.” As soon as Stephen Hawking had done his work on the big bang singularity, it was obvious that he was a major talentin this area and was capable of producing great work. It was obvious that he was an original thinker and potentially a very versatile one.</p><p>By the early seventies, Hawking had becoming famous in the world of physics, although the desease had confined him to a wheelchair and distorted his speech. He started winning prizes, was admitted to the Royal Society in 1974 and became Lucassian professor of Physics at Cambridge. Physicists had long wanted to unite two different ways of describing the universe, the very big, time and space, and the very small, light particles, but no one had come close to a unified theory. Hawking thought that the key to this might lie in black holes. The classical view of black holes was that they were black and that even light couldn’t escape their gravitational pull. Hawking challenged this conventional view. His student at the time was Bernard Carr.</p><p>“I remember that he was doing these calculations and he was getting very puzzled at this flux of particles and he had to spend quite a lot of time really thinking about this very deeply before he convinced himself that it was really correct.” Hawking discovered that a black hole wasn’t entirely black. Particles and light could radiate from it so that one day it could completely evaporate. For this he’d drawn physics right across the board and his prediction became known as Hawking radiation. </p><p>3 “It was just a beautiful result because it was merging these different areas of thermodynamics, quantum physics and relativity and really that sort of unification, it just has a feel about it that it has to be right.” “When I began research, black holes were not understood and I quite literally shed light on black holes by showing they radiate.” “I think his achievement really was that it was such an unexpected result and such a counter- intuitive one and those kind of things that go against the grain line, they really have a big impact on physics.” The prediction of Hawking radiation made his name in the world of physics. At home, relations between Hawking and his wife were anything but plain sailing. “They had first Robert, and then they had Lucy and then they had a long gap during which time I do think they drifted apart very very much because it’s extremely difficult to live with somebody who might be dead tomorrow and is getting all the time getting weaker.” The burden of day-to-day care was falling heavily on Jane’s shoulders, Hawking’s wife. There’s no doubt that they were very difficult times. The family all had to pull together and they had very little money, they were living really from month to month and the support then of the whole family was absolutely essential and Jane certainly was the main stay in keeping the whole thing going at that stage. Short of money, Hawking needed to secure his family’s future. He came up with what turned out to be a master plan, a book that would become a major money spinner. “ I was thinking of writing popular books and he told me that he was doing this and I said to him oh you’re writing this with the Cambridge University Press and he said oh Good Heavens no, I’m doing this to make money. I think he was clearly writing his book because, well he needed money and in his case it was something that was important and he certainly had his eye on making a good impression.” Hawking spent four years writing the book. In 1985 he took the manuscript with him on a scientific trip to China. Former student Bernard Carr was one of the first people to read it. “ I remember I was on a train and I remember at that stage Stephen had the first draft of the book, and I remember reading it on the train.” The book had two parts. First, the usual introduction to physics and astronomy, second, his own ideas on the nature of time and black holes, but before Hawking could finish his book, events took a turn for the worst. Within weeks of his return from China, he was taken to hospital in Geneva with pneumonia. “ I received a phone call so I flew out to Geneva to join him. It wasn’t at all clear that Stephen was going to survive and eventually he was put on the life support machine for a while and then they flew him back from Geneva to Cambridge and he was in Cambridge also on a life support machine for a while.” He was extremely upset and he was also sort of angry with the world at that point. I went to see him, his doctor was there and I said to his doctor “he’s a bonny fighter isn’t he?”, the doctor agreed that he was not in any way wanting to die at that point, he wanted to go on living and did.” Of course one of the consequences of this was that he lost the use of his voice, he actually had to have a tracheotomy and lost the use of his voice and so that changed his life in a big way. “He had no voice. He had a very bad temper and he was dealing with a frame on which he spelled things out letter by letter and a lot of conversation was done with his eyebrows which became very expressive and he was extremely frustrated and he was in intensive care for a fortnight and then in hospital for two months.” Hawking now required 24 hour nursing care but if he was to hold the family together, he needed to summon the energy to finish the book.</p><p>4 “The book meant a great deal to him. I’m sure it meant a great deal to him, and there it was now and he could see no way of completing it. And then slowly he found a mechanism with the computer and the scanning and the voice synthesizer and so on but of course that took quite a while to get all that to a point of development that he could use it efficiently and effectively.” The computer and mouse was specially designed by the husband of one of his nurses. It meant he could begin to communicate again. By moving one finger, Hawking could construct whole sentences and at last he could complete the book. In 1988 “A brief history of time” was published. By the end of the eighties, it was a publishing sensation. It has been translated into 30 languages and sold over 9 million copies. It remains the most popular science book of all times, but it’s not without its critics. “As a piece of science writing, I think the book leaves quite a lot to be desired, but as a kind of symbol of Stephen Hawking the person, it’s obviously been very successful and it sails alone, I’ll tell you that.” “Because of the combination of the kind of work he was working on , you know, talking about the universe and black holes and that kind of thing, people are interested in anyway, it’s the kind of science that people do pick up on, the fact that he’s good at it and can explain it in simple terms, but then also the fact that he’s doing this from a wheelchair, hardly able to move in many respects, is remarkable.” “In many ways, Hawking has a similar role in modern society as priests would have had in societies say, a few hundred years ago, when one wanted to know deep underlying questions about the meaning of things, one used to go to a priest, now one reads “A brief history of time”. But inside the Hawking household, the book turned out to be a mixed blessing. The fame that Stephen obtained as a result of his book I think did put his marriage under some strain, and difference in outlook between Stephen and Jane led to their separation.</p><p>“Certainly over the years, it had deteriorated very much and they were really quite ready to part but I think Jane found it very difficult to do it, so it was a difficult situation altogether.”</p><p>In 1991, they decided to divorce. For Jane it was an end to 25 years of constant care. 4 years later, Stephen married for the second time. His new wife was his former nurse, Elaine Mason. “I wasn’t surprised when they got married, because that was some time later, but I was surprised that it started at all, especially as Elaine had this perfectly nice family,two nice boys and apparently a pleasant home.”</p><p>In 1990 the Hubble telescope was launched, sending back pictures of distant galaxies and images from the early universe never seen before. It brought the details astronomers needed to conclude that the universe was not just expanding, but accelerating. Hubble also confirmed the awesome fact that most of the universe is invisible. These new findings cry out for new physics. Today, working with his PhD students, Hawking is turning his attention to theories that can explain the laws of physics at a time just after the universe was created, an era that no current telescope can picture. He meets with his students once a week.</p><p>“That is obvious. Dc and EDS are different real sections of the same complex manifold.”</p><p>“He knows an awful lot about gravity and it’s a good chance to learn from him. “I think you will just get EDS, CFT.”</p><p>5 “What I’m working on at the minutes with him is a recent proposal to develop new physics, if you like, new understanding of what occurred during the earliest periods of the universe’s evolution. And it is not clear, by any manner of means, and there are a lot of outstanding issues that we have to sort out before we get there, but it’s extremely interesting, I think.”</p><p>The uncertainties in his theoretical work are mirrored in Hawking’s daily existence. Recently, he’s had to battle harder to overcome his condition. Three years ago, he needed once again to be hospitalized. “Actually he has gone down a great deal. But he has stayed much slower, everything takes much longer, but he’s still very cheerful, and still holding out. And he’s the longest lived motor-neuron patient anyone’s ever had, and that’s with not being a patient at all, he’s rather impatient.” In 2001 Hawking published “The universe in a nutshell”, aimed at bringing his ideas to an even wider public. It’s better illustrated than “A brief history of time”, but even scientific experts like me find parts of it inaccessible. Hawking is not known for simplicity in the way he presents his ideas. “My biggest criticism with Hawking is that he’s playing a very dangerous game with the public understanding of science, by portraying scientific ideas as facts when they really don’t have that status.”</p><p>But how revolutionary has his contribution been ? “I wouldn’t put him in the same category as Einstein. I wouldn’t put him in the same category as Dirak or Sheoninger or some of the people who really produced completely new ways of thinking about the way the world is. Stephen has worked within the context of the theories that other people have produced, and he’s done it on occasion brilliantly. “Some of my best work was in the seventies, but does that make it less …or less significant ? I also made important contributions in the sixties, eighties and nineties and it’s too early to say what I will be able to do in the noughties, but I have my hopes.”</p><p>“Stephen Hawking is still a major player, trying to push back the frontiers of what we can understand of that early universe, and he’s still active and he’s still supervising students and producing the next generation of scientists, doing original and very creative work, and he’s leading the way at the frontiers and long may he continue to do so.”</p><p>“I never look ahead too far, that is what my …has taught me and I intend to keep on working, to the despair of my wife. If I knew what I would be working on in ten years, I would be doing it now, I just follow my goals.”</p><p>Hawking challenged this conventional view. His student at the time was Bernard Carr. “I remember that he was doing these calculations and he was getting very puzzled at this flux of particles and he had to spend quite a lot of time really thinking about this very deeply before he convinced himself that it was really correct.” Hawking discovered that a black hole wasn’t entirely black. Particles and light could radiate from it so that one day it could completely evaporate. For this he’d drawn physics right across the board and his prediction became known as Hawking radiation. “It was just a beautiful result because it was merging these different areas of thermodynamics, quantum physics and relativity and really that sort of unification, it just has a feel about it that it has to be right.”</p><p>6 “When I began research, black holes were not understood and I quite literally shed light on black holes by showing they radiate.” “I think his achievement really was that it was such an unexpected result and such a counter- intuitive one and those kind of things that go against the grain line, they really have a big impact on physics.” The prediction of Hawking radiation made his name in the world of physics. At home, relations between Hawking and his wife were anything but plain sailing. “They had first Robert, and then they had Lucy and then they had a long gap during which time I do think they drifted apart very very much because it’s extremely difficult to live with somebody who might be dead tomorrow and is getting all the time getting weaker.” The burden of day-to-day care was falling heavily on Jane’s shoulders, Hawking’s wife. There’s no doubt that they were very difficult times. The family all had to pull together and they had very little money, they were living really from month to month and the support then of the whole family was absolutely essential and Jane certainly was the main stay in keeping the whole thing going at that stage. Short of money, Hawking needed to secure his family’s future. He came up with what turned out to be a master plan, a book that would become a major money spinner. “ I was thinking of writing popular books and he told me that he was doing this and I said to him oh you’re writing this with the Cambridge University Press and he said oh Good Heavens no, I’m doing this to make money. I think he was clearly writing his book because, well he needed money and in his case it was something that was important and he certainly had his eye on making a good impression.” Hawking spent four years writing the book. In 1985 he took the manuscript with him on a scientific trip to China. Former student Bernard Carr was one of the first people to read it. “ I remember I was on a train and I remember at that stage Stephen had the first draft of the book, and I remember reading it on the train.” The book had two parts. First, the usual introduction to physics and astronomy, second, his own ideas on the nature of time and black holes, but before Hawking could finish his book, events took a turn for the worst. Within weeks of his return from China, he was taken to hospital in Geneva with pneumonia. “ I received a phone call so I flew out to Geneva to join him. It wasn’t at all clear that Stephen was going to survive and eventually he was put on the life support machine for a while and then they flew him back from Geneva to Cambridge and he was in Cambridge also on a life support machine for a while.” He was extremely upset and he was also sort of angry with the world at that point. I went to see him, his doctor was there and I said to his doctor “he’s a bonny fighter isn’t he?”, the doctor agreed that he was not in any way wanting to die at that point, he wanted to go on living and did.” Of course one of the consequences of this was that he lost the use of his voice, he actually had to have a tracheotomy and lost the use of his voice and so that changed his life in a big way. “He had no voice. He had a very bad temper and he was dealing with a frame on which he spelled things out letter by letter and a lot of conversation was done with his eyebrows which became very expressive and he was extremely frustrated and he was in intensive care for a fortnight and then in hospital for two months.” Hawking now required 24 hour nursing care but if he was to hold the family together, he needed to summon the energy to finish the book. “The book meant a great deal to him. I’m sure it meant a great deal to him, and there it was now and he could see no way of completing it. And then slowly he found a mechanism with the computer and the scanning and the voice synthesizer and so on but of course that took </p><p>7 quite a while to get all that to a point of development that he could use it efficiently and effectively.” The computer and mouse was specially designed by the husband of one of his nurses. It meant he could begin to communicate again. By moving one finger, Hawking could construct whole sentences and at last he could complete the book. In 1988 “A brief history of time” was published. By the end of the eighties, it was a publishing sensation. It has been translated into 30 languages and sold over 9 million copies. It remains the most popular science book of all times, but it’s not without its critics. “As a piece of science writing, I think the book leaves quite a lot to be desired, but as a kind of symbol of Stephen Hawking the person, it’s obviously been very successful and it sails alone, I’ll tell you that.” “Because of the combination of the kind of work he was working on , you know, talking about the universe and black holes and that kind of thing, people are interested in anyway, it’s the kind of science that people do pick up on, the fact that he’s good at it and can explain it in simple terms, but then also the fact that he’s doing this from a wheelchair, hardly able to move in many respects, is remarkable.” “In many ways, Hawking has a similar role in modern society as priests would have had in societies say, a few hundred years ago, when one wanted to know deep underlying questions about the meaning of things, one used to go to a priest, now one reads “A brief history of time”. But inside the Hawking household, the book turned out to be a mixed blessing. The fame that Stephen obtained as a result of his book I think did put his marriage under some strain, and difference in outlook between Stephen and Jane led to their separation.</p><p>“Certainly over the years, it had deteriorated very much and they were really quite ready to part but I think Jane found it very difficult to do it, so it was a difficult situation altogether.”</p><p>In 1991, they decided to divorce. For Jane it was an end to 25 years of constant care. 4 years later, Stephen married for the second time. His new wife was his former nurse, Elaine Mason. “I wasn’t surprised when they got married, because that was some time later, but I was surprised that it started at all, especially as Elaine had this perfectly nice family,two nice boys and apparently a pleasant home.”</p><p>In 1990 the Hubble telescope was launched, sending back pictures of distant galaxies and images from the early universe never seen before. It brought the details astronomers needed to conclude that the universe was not just expanding, but accelerating. Hubble also confirmed the awesome fact that most of the universe is invisible. These new findings cry out for new physics. Today, working with his PhD students, Hawking is turning his attention to theories that can explain the laws of physics at a time just after the universe was created, an era that no current telescope can picture. He meets with his students once a week.</p><p>“That is obvious. Dc and EDS are different real sections of the same complex manifold.”</p><p>“He knows an awful lot about gravity and it’s a good chance to learn from him. “I think you will just get EDS, CFT.” “What I’m working on at the minutes with him is a recent proposal to develop new physics, if you like, new understanding of what occurred during the earliest periods of the universe’s </p><p>8 evolution. And it is not clear, by any manner of means, and there are a lot of outstanding issues that we have to sort out before we get there, but it’s extremely interesting, I think.”</p><p>The uncertainties in his theoretical work are mirrored in Hawking’s daily existence. Recently, he’s had to battle harder to overcome his condition. Three years ago, he needed once again to be hospitalized. “Actually he has gone down a great deal. But he has stayed much slower, everything takes much longer, but he’s still very cheerful, and still holding out. And he’s the longest lived motor-neuron patient anyone’s ever had, and that’s with not being a patient at all, he’s rather impatient.” In 2001 Hawking published “The universe in a nutshell”, aimed at bringing his ideas to an even wider public. It’s better illustrated than “A brief history of time”, but even scientific experts like me find parts of it inaccessible. Hawking is not known for simplicity in the way he presents his ideas. “My biggest criticism with Hawking is that he’s playing a very dangerous game with the public understanding of science, by portraying scientific ideas as facts when they really don’t have that status.”</p><p>But how revolutionary has his contribution been ? “I wouldn’t put him in the same category as Einstein. I wouldn’t put him in the same category as Dirak or Sheoninger or some of the people who really produced completely new ways of thinking about the way the world is. Stephen has worked within the context of the theories that other people have produced, and he’s done it on occasion brilliantly. “Some of my best work was in the seventies, but does that make it less …or less significant ? I also made important contributions in the sixties, eighties and nineties and it’s too early to say what I will be able to do in the noughties, but I have my hopes.”</p><p>“Stephen Hawking is still a major player, trying to push back the frontiers of what we can understand of that early universe, and he’s still active and he’s still supervising students and producing the next generation of scientists, doing original and very creative work, and he’s leading the way at the frontiers and long may he continue to do so.”</p><p>“I never look ahead too far, that is what my …has taught me and I intend to keep on working, to the despair of my wife. If I knew what I would be working on in ten years, I would be doing it now, I just follow my goals.”</p><p>9</p>