Stephen Hawking: The Theoretical Physicist Who Read the Mind of God

Few figures in the modern history of science have so completely fused the work of the theoretical physicist with the role of the cultural icon as Stephen William Hawking, the Cambridge cosmologist who, from a wheelchair to which he was confined by motor neuron disease for fifty-five years and through a synthesised voice that became, in his last decades, one of the most recognisable sounds in the English-speaking world, transformed the public understanding of black holes, of the origin of the universe, and of the place of human consciousness within a cosmos that seemed at once incomprehensibly large and rigorously rational. He was, by general agreement of his peers, one of the most important theoretical physicists of the second half of the twentieth century, the man who in 1974 had brought together the previously incompatible domains of general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics in a single equation describing the temperature of a black hole and who had thereby opened the most fertile field of theoretical physics of the following half-century. He was also, by general agreement of the reading public, the most popular and most widely read scientific writer of his generation, the author of A Brief History of Time, the book that sold more than twenty-five million copies in forty languages and that more readers bought, started, and failed to finish than perhaps any other serious volume of the late twentieth century. He was a celebrity who appeared on The Simpsons, on Star Trek, on Pink Floyd albums, and at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games; he was a public intellectual whose pronouncements on artificial intelligence, on extraterrestrial life, on the future of humanity, and on the existence of God commanded the front pages of newspapers around the world; he was, in his last decade, an emblem of human endurance and intellectual triumph against physical adversity whose face and voice had become almost as universally recognisable as those of Albert Einstein in the previous century.

The juxtaposition of intellectual mastery and physical disability that defined his public image was not a sentimental construction of the press. It was the central, irreducible fact of his adult life. He had been a healthy and vigorous undergraduate at University College, Oxford, an oarsman, a coxswain in the college boat club, a young man of conventional academic gifts but without obvious distinction, when in the autumn of 1962 — at the very beginning of his graduate work in Cambridge, just past his twenty-first birthday — he began to fall over, to slur his words, to lose dexterity in his hands. The diagnosis the following spring of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the form of motor neuron disease most often called Lou Gehrig's disease in the United States, came with the bleak medical assessment that he had at most two or three years to live. He outlived that prognosis by fifty-three years. He completed his doctorate, married Jane Wilde, fathered three children, took the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge that Isaac Newton had once held, wrote the canonical theoretical papers on the singularity theorems of general relativity and on the quantum mechanics of black holes, watched his physical capacities decline year by year until in 1985 a tracheotomy following a near-fatal bout of pneumonia took away his voice and forced him onto the speech synthesiser that became his trademark, and continued to think, to compute, to publish, to teach, to lecture, and to travel until the spring of 2018, when he died at his home in Cambridge at the age of seventy-six.

The body of theoretical work that he produced over those years has been one of the most consequential in the modern history of physics. With Roger Penrose, in a series of papers between 1965 and 1970, he established the singularity theorems of general relativity, which proved that under very general conditions Einstein's gravitational equations predicted the existence of points of infinite curvature — singularities — at the centres of black holes and at the beginning of the universe. With James Bardeen and Brandon Carter, in 1973, he formulated the four laws of black hole mechanics, which exhibited the formal mathematical analogy between black holes and ordinary thermodynamic systems. In a paper of January 1974 that altered the trajectory of theoretical physics, he showed that the laws of quantum mechanics imply that black holes are not in fact perfectly black but radiate thermal radiation, the so-called Hawking radiation, at a temperature inversely proportional to their mass, with the consequence that black holes slowly evaporate over time and, paradoxically, appear to destroy the information about whatever had fallen into them. The black hole information paradox to which this discovery gave rise has remained, half a century later, one of the deepest unsolved problems in theoretical physics, and the field of research it generated — black hole thermodynamics, the holographic principle, the connection between quantum entanglement and the geometry of spacetime — constitutes the most active frontier of contemporary research on the unification of gravity and quantum mechanics. With James Hartle, in 1983, he proposed the no-boundary condition for the wave function of the universe, an attempt to apply the principles of quantum mechanics to cosmology and to remove from physical theory the initial singularity at the Big Bang. He continued to publish significant papers on these subjects until the year of his death.

These were the achievements that earned him election to the Royal Society at the age of thirty-two, the Albert Einstein Medal in 1979, the Lucasian Chair the same year, the Wolf Prize in 1988, the Copley Medal in 2006, and a long list of other honours from learned societies and universities around the world. They did not earn him the Nobel Prize in Physics, for the simple reason that Hawking radiation, the discovery that should have led to a Nobel by every customary measure, has not yet been experimentally confirmed; the temperature of even a stellar-mass black hole is so low — about a hundred-millionth of a degree above absolute zero — that the radiation is far below the threshold of current astronomical detection, and the Nobel Foundation has consistently refused to award the prize for theoretical work that lacks experimental confirmation. The omission was, by his late years, a standing complaint of his friends and admirers; he himself professed never to have minded it, observing that he had every other honour the discipline could offer and had no need of a Nobel to fix his place in the history of science.

But it was the public face of Hawking, more than the professional achievements, that made him the great popular icon of late twentieth-century science. The publication in April 1988 of A Brief History of Time, a short volume of popular cosmology that he had written in painful longhand over six years and that was issued by Bantam Books after his original publisher Cambridge University Press had questioned its commercial viability, transformed him overnight into a global celebrity. The book remained on the Sunday Times bestseller list for two hundred and thirty-seven consecutive weeks, sold more than twenty-five million copies in its various editions, was translated into forty languages, and gave its title to a 1991 Errol Morris documentary that brought Hawking's face and voice to a still wider audience. From that point onward he was no longer simply a Cambridge professor; he was the most famous scientist in the world, a man whose pronouncements on any topic commanded headlines and whose physical struggle against motor neuron disease made him a figure of inspiration to disabled people and to the general public alike. He appeared in cameos on The Simpsons (more than once), on Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he played poker with Newton and Einstein in the holodeck of the Enterprise), on The Big Bang Theory, in Pink Floyd's song Keep Talking and on their album The Division Bell, and at countless public events including the opening ceremony of the 2012 Paralympic Games in London. He gave the Reith Lectures on the BBC, met with American presidents, addressed the United Nations, took a parabolic flight to experience weightlessness at the age of sixty-five, planned (though never made) a journey on Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and provided in The Theory of Everything, the 2014 biographical film in which Eddie Redmayne won the Academy Award for Best Actor for portraying him, a portrait that introduced his life to a still wider audience.

The biography that follows traces in detail the long path from the wartime Oxford in which he was born in January 1942 to the Cambridge in which he died in March 2018: the childhood in St Albans and the eccentric, intellectually intense home environment of the Hawking family, the schooldays at St Albans School in which his abilities were recognised by some teachers and overlooked by others, the undergraduate years at Oxford in which he combined a brilliant casual mastery of physics with a determination not to be seen to work too hard, the move to Cambridge in 1962 and the immediate onset of the symptoms of motor neuron disease, the doctoral work under Dennis Sciama that brought him into contact with Roger Penrose and the theoretical revolution then beginning in general relativity, the great discoveries of the 1970s on the thermodynamics and quantum mechanics of black holes, the long and increasingly difficult marriage to Jane Wilde, the celebrity that followed A Brief History of Time, the second marriage to his nurse Elaine Mason, the divorce and reconciliation with Jane, the steady physical decline punctuated by extraordinary intellectual productivity, the cultural ubiquity of his later years, and the universal recognition that followed his death. It is a story in which the most abstract speculations of mathematical physics, the practical realities of severe physical disability, the dynamics of a complicated personal life, and the dynamics of late twentieth-century celebrity are interwoven into a single human life of remarkable will, remarkable luck, and remarkable consequence.

Birth and Family in Oxford