Stephen Hawking

An Oxford undergraduate who barely studied

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, on the three-hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s death. His parents had moved out of London for the birth because the city was being bombed, and the Germans had a tacit agreement to spare Oxford and Cambridge if the British spared Heidelberg and Göttingen. Frank Hawking was a tropical medicine researcher, Isobel a philosophy graduate. The household was bookish and a little chaotic; dinner was eaten in silence with each member of the family reading a book.

Stephen went up to University College, Oxford, in 1959 at the age of seventeen on a scholarship in natural sciences. By his own admission he barely studied. The prevailing undergraduate attitude was that visible effort was vulgar, and Hawking absorbed it completely. He later estimated that he spent about a thousand hours on academic work across three years, roughly an hour a day. When his final examiners struggled to decide between a first and a second, he told them that if they gave him a first he would go to Cambridge, and if they gave him a second he would stay in Oxford. They gave him a first.

A diagnosis at twenty-one

He arrived at Cambridge in October 1962 to begin a PhD in cosmology. That winter, home for the Christmas holiday, he fell while skating on a frozen pond and could not get up. Tests gave the diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor-neurone disease that destroys the nerves controlling voluntary muscle. The neurologist told him he had perhaps two years to live. Hawking was twenty-one. He went back to his rooms, played Wagner at full volume, and considered what to do with the time he had.

What he did was get to work. He proposed to Jane Wilde, a Cambridge languages student, and married her in 1965. He finished his PhD that same year. The disease progressed more slowly than the doctors had predicted, eventually reaching a plateau where it spared his ability to think and to communicate. Hawking later said the diagnosis had focused him. He had been a lazy undergraduate; he became a relentless researcher because he was no longer sure how much time remained.

Stephen William Hawking (8January 194214March 2018) was an English theoretical astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.

Black holes that are not black

Through the late 1960s and early 1970s Hawking worked with Roger Penrose on the mathematics of singularities, proving that under general relativity an expanding universe must have begun in one. By 1973 he was applying quantum field theory to the curved spacetime around a black hole, and the answer he got in 1974 startled even him. A black hole is not perfectly black. Pair production at the event horizon allows one member of each virtual pair to fall in and the other to escape as a real particle. From the outside the black hole appears to glow with a thermal spectrum, leaking energy and slowly evaporating. The temperature, which fell out of the calculation, was the simple combination ℏc³/(8πGMk_B). Smaller black holes are hotter. A truly tiny one would explode. His Nature paper that year was titled, with the equanimity of a man who had been told he was dying for over a decade, “Black hole explosions?”

The result welded three pieces of physics together. Gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics had refused to share a sentence before 1974. It established that black holes carry an entropy proportional to the area of their horizon, and it created the information paradox that has occupied theorists ever since. In 1979 Cambridge appointed Hawking to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, the post Isaac Newton had held three centuries earlier. He kept it for thirty years, retiring in 2009.

A synthesizer and a bestseller

A bout of pneumonia in 1985 left Hawking with a tracheotomy that took his speech. A Cambridge engineer wired a speech synthesizer to a cheek-twitch interface, and the voice that came out had an American accent. Hawking refused upgrades for the rest of his life because the world had come to recognise that voice as his own.

In 1988 he published A Brief History of Time, a popular account of cosmology written for readers with no mathematical training. His editor warned him that every equation would halve his sales, so the book contains only one, E = mc². It sold twenty-five million copies and made him the most famous living scientist on Earth. He continued to publish original work into his seventies, often in collaboration with younger researchers who spoke the equations aloud while he composed sentences one word at a time. The Nobel Prize never came. Hawking radiation is a theoretical prediction, and direct observation requires either a primordial black hole or an analogue system in the laboratory, neither of which has produced an unambiguous detection.

Stephen William Hawking (8January 194214March 2018) was an English theoretical astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious…

Westminster Abbey

Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, at the age of seventy-six, fifty-five years after the neurologist had given him two. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey on 15 June 2018, between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The stone over his ashes carries the temperature formula he derived in 1974, the equation that turned a black hole from a one-way drain into an object with entropy, temperature, and a thermodynamic story.

What he means to the quantum story

Hawking is the bridge between the very small and the very large. He took the rules that Planck, Einstein, and Schrödinger built for atoms and applied them to the most extreme objects general relativity permits, and out came a temperature.