Documentary Space: The life and times of Stephen Hawking

Today, Hawking is one of the world’s leading thinkers on cosmology and the history and evolution of the universe. ANDRÉ PATTENDEN/COURTESY STEPHEN HAWKING

All of us astronomy types owe a lot more to Stephen
Hawking than I think most of us realize. He has been
at the forefront of thinking on cosmology, gravitation,
black holes, and related subjects for many years.
Many of us know that Hawking had for years,
until 2009, held the Lucasian Professorship of
Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, the
same chair occupied 300 years earlier by Isaac
Newton. Just a few years ago, Hawking founded
and became the first director of the Centre for
Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge.

Most of us know his life story reasonably
well, particularly in the wake of the
2014 film The Theory of Everything, which
depicted his struggle for knowledge and
survival. The movie brought home an
Academy Award for actor Eddie Redmayne.
Obviously, Hawking’s story of triumph
and brilliance is deeply intertwined
in the public perception with his debilitating
motor neuron disease, diagnosed in
1963 when Hawking was 21 years old.
That such a combination of sheer brilliance
exists in a body that has withstood
an incredible attack of nature is overwhelming
and inspiring to us all.
Knowing that you’re in the room with
perhaps the smartest human being on the
planet is an amazing experience. Last year,
Hawking attended the Starmus Festival in
the Canary Islands, the unique gathering
of science enthusiasts that features talks by
Nobel Prize winners, astronaut-explorers,
science communicators, and researchers,
as well as celebrations of music, art, and
life on Earth. He delivered two incredible
talks, one on the creation of the universe
and the other on black holes. He sat near
the front in the audience during my talk
about recent astronomical advances and
the communication of science to the public.
Trust me, there is a magnetic feeling
one has when Hawking sits close by.
Now, a year later, we are both on the
Board of Directors of the Starmus Festival.
And I am proud to say that due to the
herculean efforts of Garik Israelian,
the founder and director of
Starmus, that next year, in
June 2016, the third Starmus
Festival will take place, again
in the Canaries. And this
time it will constitute a major
tribute to Stephen Hawking, his
life and times. It will be an experience
in the world of astronomy, cosmology,
physics, and entertainment like
no other that has come before it.
Despite all we know about Hawking,
there is something more there. Something
almost magical. Let me explain.
Humble beginnings
Stephen William Hawking was born
January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, in
the midst of World War II and the ongoing
blitz bombing by the Nazis. He was
descended from a line of tenant farmers,
his father being the first to attend college,
at Oxford, where he studied medicine.
His mother was the daughter of a Scottish
doctor. To the day, Hawking was born 300
years after Galileo’s death. At first, however,
no one suspected he would become
attached to the heavens.
The family had spent time in Oxford
rather than always staying home in London
because the former was off-limits for Nazi
bombing, along with Cambridge (as were
the German university towns of Heidelberg
and Göttingen). In Highgate, North London,
the Hawking family grew. “My earliest
memory is of standing in the nursery
of Byron House School in Highgate and
crying my head off,” Hawking says in his
memoir, My Brief History (Bantam, 2013).
Discomfort from being left with strangers
splayed against the trauma of an occasional
bomb dropped nearby. “A V-2 rocket
landed a few houses away from
ours,” he says.
Hawking grew up enjoying
his train set and later built
model airplanes and ships.
After the war, in 1950, the
family moved to St. Albans, 20
miles north of central London,
so that Hawking’s father could be
close to the newly opened National
Institute for Medical Research, where he
studied tropical diseases. In St. Albans,
“the family was regarded as eccentric,” says
Hawking. The Hawkings weren’t poor, but
they were of relatively modest means.
Education in England was very hierarchical,
and Hawking did well enough to
be classed fairly high but stayed in public
schools. During the last portion of his
normal schooling, he became interested
in mathematics and physics. Physics,
Hawking thought, was somewhat boring
“because it was so easy and obvious.” But
physics and astronomy offered the hope
of understanding the meaning of it all.
“I wanted to fathom the depths of the
universe,” he says.
How to make a physicist
In 1959, at age 17, Hawking took an
entrance exam for Oxford. He received
a scholarship and commenced schooling
there, in his third year joining the boating
club as a coxswain in order to make more
friends. He didn’t work particularly hard,
averaging an hour of studying per day,
but that was the prevailing attitude then
at Oxford. One should rely on brilliance.
Despite that, he advanced successfully to
graduate school.
In October 1962, Hawking arrived at
Cambridge as a grad student, having
applied to work with the great astronomer
and cosmologist Fred Hoyle. He ended up
working with Dennis Sciama and was
excited by the prospects of cosmology
and elementary particle physics. Particle
physics was in a strange period of research,
so Hawking gravitated toward cosmology
and gravitation, two seemingly neglected
fields that offered lots of opportunity.
Hawking joined the battle to expand
the understanding of general relativity just
as that movement was gaining momentum.
During his last year at Oxford, however, he
noticed increased clumsiness. He saw a
physician after falling down some stairs,
and the doctor merely warned him to “lay
off the beer.” But while skating on a
frozen lake at St. Albans, he fell
and could not get back on his
feet. Just after his 21st birthday,
Hawking entered a hospital
for tests.
The doctors at first were
not too communicative, but
soon Hawking was diagnosed
with an incurable, rare type of a motor
neuron disease in the vein of ALS, “Lou
Gehrig’s disease,” that has since paralyzed
him. “The realization that I had an incurable
disease that was likely to kill me in
a few years was a bit of a shock,” says
Hawking. That is certainly something of
an understatement. Some of the doctors
initially thought he would only live for a
couple years. That was 52 years ago, and he
is still going strong.

Marriage and family
Hawking had met Jane Wilde, a friend
of his sister’s, just before his diagnosis,
and the two wanted to get married. If
so, he would need a job. And for that, he
would need to finish his Ph.D. Set against
the background of an uncertain future,
Hawking thrust into high working gear for
the first time. Hawking was inspired by
Roger Penrose, who hypothesized spacetime
singularities in the centers of black
holes, and applied this thinking to the
entire universe in his Ph.D. dissertation,
which he completed in
1966. Meanwhile, the previous
year, he married Jane.
The Hawking family grew.
Son Robert was born in 1967,
daughter Lucy in 1970, and later,
another son, Timothy, in 1979.
At the tail end of the 1960s and
throughout the 1970s, Hawking worked
tirelessly on gravitational waves and their
likely sources (black holes), on the confirmation
of the Big Bang theory, and on a
theory of causal structure in general relativity,
and became increasingly interested
in black holes. A few days after the birth of
his daughter, Hawking realized he could
apply some of the work he had done with
causal theory to black holes. He also had
published significant work on the meaning
of general relativity, showing among other
things that it would break down at singularities,
i.e. in black holes.
General relativity and
black holes
Hawking next turned to attempting to
combine general relativity, the behavior of
the very large, with quantum theory, the
behavior of the very small. He used black
holes as the theoretical test bed for quantum
behavior. How would quantum fields
scatter off of a black hole? His calculations
demonstrated, much to his astonishment,
that a black hole would show some emission,
not simply scattering.
This finding showed that a previously
unknown relationship must exist between
thermodynamics — the science of heat —
and gravity. Hawking had discovered that
over time radiation leaks away from a black
hole, eventually evaporating it. This came
to be known as Hawking radiation.
Hawking’s calculations showed that the
radiation leaking from black holes would
be thermal and random. But the evaporating
black hole left a paradox at the heart of
physics. How could the radiation left over
carry all the information about what made
the black hole? And if the information was
lost, that would seem to be incompatible
with quantum physics. Hawking believes
that information is not lost, but it is simply
not returned in a meaningful way.
In the early 1970s, Hawking spent time
doing research with his good friend Kip
Thorne at the California Institute of
Technology, and the Hawking family
enjoyed the Golden State. He graduated
from a mechanical to an electric wheelchair,
and taking care of him became a
family affair. Back to England in the mid-
’70s, the Hawkings continued to focus on
their many family activities as Stephen’s
condition gradually worsened.
Complexity and challenge
By the 1980s, the Hawkings’ marriage
had become strained, and Jane began to
have romantic feelings for a church organist
she knew, Jonathan Hellyer Jones. He
moved in with the family to help take care
of Hawking, who did not object, thinking
the family would need someone to care for
them when he was gone. Hawking began
to have choking fits, and during a Swiss
trip in 1985, was rushed to the hospital and
placed on a ventilator. Surgeons had to perform
a tracheotomy, meaning Hawking’s
ability to speak, already badly degraded,
would now be completely gone.
Now Hawking could only communicate
by learning to spell out words one letter at
a time on a spelling card using eyebrow
motions to indicate choices. It was, needless
to say, exceptionally frustrating at first
and required countless hours of practice.
One of the greatest minds the world has
known was in danger of being completely
cut off from the rest of us, still functioning
magnificently, but in danger of no clear
channel of communication.
Moreover, Hawking had become upset
with the increasing closeness of Jane and
Jonathan. He moved out, into a flat, in
1990. One of his nurses, Elaine Mason, who
he had grown close to over hours of caregiving,
moved in with him. Five years later
they were married, and Hawking declared:
“It’s wonderful — I have married the
woman I love.” He has subsequently stated
that several times, Elaine has saved his life.
In 1982, Hawking had the idea to write
a popular level book about his research on
the universe, and the subsequent title, A
Brief History of Time, was an incredible
runaway best-seller. Rather than his technical
publisher, Cambridge University Press,
Hawking sold the book to Bantam, wanting
to reach as large a market as he could.
Following the huge success of his book,
Hawking turned to another spectacular
subject in physics, the possibility of time
travel. In 1990, Hawking’s friend Thorne
had posited that perhaps time travel would
be possible by passing through wormholes
(black holes that could be used as ways to
travel in time or space). Can the laws of
physics allow a wormhole and space-time
to be so warped that a spaceship could
enter it and return to its own past? Could
an advanced civilization construct a time
machine by modifying a small part of
space-time so that it closed time-like
curves of space in a finite region?
Theoretically, the answer depends on
the model you use and also the assumptions
you make about various conditions
within it. But, to quote Hawking, “the
future looks black for time travel, or should
I say blindingly white?” It does not appear
that the laws of physics allow for traveling
back in time, regardless of the space-time
curvature. “Even if some different theory is
discovered in the future,” says Hawking, “I
don’t think time travel will be possible.”
Over time, Hawking has come to live
with his disability with increasing success.
He has moved to a more sophisticated
wheelchair and to progressively better systems
of computer communication. His
accomplishments in theoretical physics,
cosmology, astrophysics, and related fields
have formed a new basis for understanding
relativity and the origin and fate of the cosmos,
a century after the heyday of Einstein.
One could rightly ask the question: How
is it that Stephen Hawking has not been
awarded a Nobel Prize?
Hawking’s mind is of course as sharp as
ever. This was witnessed most recently by
astronomy enthusiasts from his two gripping
talks at Starmus.

Starmus 3: A Tribute to
Stephen Hawking
Hawking’s presence at Starmus 2, in
September 2014 in the Canary Islands,
sets up an amazing next iteration of the
world’s greatest science festival. For those
not familiar with Starmus, the gathering
was founded by astronomer Garik Israelian
and features a board of directors including
astrophysicist and Queen guitarist Brian
May, cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins, musician
Peter Gabriel, and Hawking himself.
The first Starmus took place in 2011, the
second last year, and the third and greatest
thus far is planned for June 27–July 2, 2016.
Nearly 1,000 people attended Starmus 2
in Tenerife and La Palma, enjoying stellar
talks from a who’s who of scientists, astronaut-
explorers, and artists.
Starmus 3 will be far bigger yet,
with the theme constituting a tribute to
Hawking and his life in science. The event,
which is expected to draw on the order of
1,800 people, will be titled: “Beyond the
Horizon: Tribute to Stephen Hawking.”
Nothing like Starmus 3 has ever taken
place before. Ten Nobel Prize-winning scientists
will be delivering talks, including
astrophysicists Adam Riess and Brian
Schmidt (co-discoverers of dark energy);
astrophysicist Robert Wilson (co-discoverer
of the cosmic microwave background radiation);
chemists Harry Kroto (discoverer of
buckminsterfullerene) and Eric Betzig (fluorescence
microscopy); physicist David
Gross (particle physics); biologists Carol
Greider and Elizabeth Blackburn (DNA
enzymes); and Edvard Moser and
May-Britt Moser (brain cell
physiology).
Moreover, incredible
astronauts and astronomers
also will speak at the festival.
They include Leonov, the first
human to walk in space;
Apollo astronaut Rusty
Schweickart; cosmonaut Sergey
Volkov; astronauts Chris Hadfield, Garrett
Reisman, and Michael López-Alegría;
and astronomers Lord Martin Rees, Kip
Thorne, Jill Tarter, Robert Williams, Neil
deGrasse Tyson, and Neil Turok. Other bigname
speakers will be announced soon.
The festival also will include time spent
at the 10.4-meter Gran Telescopio Cana rias,
the world’s largest optical telescope, not to
mention observing under some of the best
skies on Earth. Plus, attendees won’t want
to miss the Sonic Universe Concert featuring
Brian May and other special guests.
Says Hawking: “With this next edition,
Starmus confirms its position as a unique
debating chamber for the future of the
human race.” It is an event filled with intellectual
exploration, amazing astronomy,
music, and fun, and is structured so that
attendees can spend time with these leading
lights of science. This is what
makes the festival unique. For
more details on Starmus, see
www.starmus.com.
Hawking’s life, to be celebrated
in a special way next year,
casts an enormous example onto
the world for those of us who adore
the universe. He has shown, time and
again, that the power of the human mind
has a unique ability — to outstretch troubles
and challenges in our everyday world,
to aspire to and to reach a greater understanding
of ourselves on Earth.
That’s why all humans owe something
to Hawking. He has been not only one of
the brightest minds we have ever seen, but
also a shining example of the best ideals of
humanity. Let the celebration begin.

David J. Eicher is editor of Astronomy and is
proud to be a member of the Starmus Festival
Board of Directors, as well as a lifelong admirer
of Stephen Hawking.