Stephen Hawking

English physicist and cosmologist

• Born: January 8, 1942
• Birthplace: Oxford, England
• Died: March 14, 2018
• Place of death: Cambridge, England

Many consider Stephen Hawking to have been the greatest physicist of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His work combined the two primary developments of early twentieth-century physics, general relativity and quantum mechanics, to explain the origins and structure of the universe. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time was a best seller that introduced studies of the universe to nonscientists.

Early Life

Stephen Hawking was born on the three hundredth anniversary of the death of one of the greatest physicists of all time, Galileo Galilei, who is generally credited with proving that the earth revolves around the sun. Hawking’s birth also came only four days after the three hundredth birthday of another great physicist, Sir Isaac Newton, who developed a mathematical model to explain the structure of the universe that was essentially unchallenged for over two hundred years. Hawking was born in Oxford, England, and both of his parents had attended Oxford University. However, the Hawkings had only recently returned to Oxford to escape the likelihood of London being bombed during World War II.

Hawking’s father, Frank, was a physician who had the same ambition for his son. After the war, the family returned to London, where Frank directed the parasitology division of the National Institute for Medical Research. The family moved again in 1950 to St. Albans in Hertfordshire, where, at age eight, Hawking enrolled in St. Albans School. He was an unexceptional student there, although his mathematics teacher proved to be an early inspiration to him.

Despite his father’s encouragements, Hawking did not find medicine and biology theoretically rich enough and instead decided to major in physics at University College, Oxford. By his own admission, Hawking averaged barely one hour per day of studying at Oxford and decided to concentrate on theoretical physics as a way to avoid the busywork of memorizing facts. After graduating from Oxford, Hawking had hoped to study at Cambridge University with Fred Hoyle, who had developed steady-state cosmology, which argues that the structure of the universe remains relatively constant over time. However, Hawking’s acceptance to Cambridge was contingent on his receiving honors from Oxford. Because of his lack of studying, his final examination scores at Oxford were only borderline for an honors degree. In an interview, he then told his examiners that if they gave him honors, he would go to Cambridge. Otherwise, he would stay at Oxford. They awarded him a first-class honors degree in natural science in 1962.

Upon reaching Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Hawking was disappointed to learn that he would not study with Hoyle but with Dennis Sciama, another steady-state cosmologist, but one unfamiliar to Hawking. However, Sciama turned out to be much more available and open to students developing their own alternative perspectives than Hoyle would have been. Within a few months of arriving at Cambridge, Hawking faced a far more serious disappointment. Although he was coxswain on a university crew team, he was never robust or athletic, and he was becoming increasingly clumsy. At his parents’ insistence, he saw a doctor. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease in the United States), a degenerative condition causing the gradual loss of control of all muscles, including those necessary to move, gesture, speak, and swallow. Hawking was told he would live perhaps another two years and entered a deep depression as he contemplated the futility of trying to complete his doctorate. Sciama persuaded him to continue but refused to lower his standards.

In 1965, a turning point in Hawking’s outlook for the future came when he married Jane Wilde, also a university student. As his condition worsened, he came to need a cane, then a wheelchair, and then an artificial speech synthesizer. However, he overcame the depression and survived despite the diagnosis. After completing his doctorate, he became a research fellow at Cambridge.

Through Sciama, Hawking met Roger Penrose, a mathematician who had developed the idea of a “singularity,” a point at which the laws of mathematics and science break down. Hawking earned his doctorate by proposing that singularities could be used to understand the structure of the universe. He came to rethink the concept of singularity and argued that the laws of physics are continuous throughout the universe.

Life’s Work

Early in the twentieth century, Newton’s physics faced two challenges: relativity, conceived by Albert Einstein, and quantum mechanics, which had several founders. Although Einstein contributed to the development of quantum mechanics, he was uncomfortable with it. What most disturbed him was the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg, which suggests that not everything is knowable and measurable. Because Einstein’s relativity insists that everything can ultimately be determined, a position that it shared with Newtonian mechanics, Hawking called it a “classical theory.” One implication of relativity that Einstein himself shunned was that large stars could collapse into black holes, single points with such overwhelming gravitational strength that nothing, including light, can escape. Penrose considered black holes to be singularities and thought that since they emitted no signals, they were unknowable by the laws of physics as scientists understood them.

In the 1920s, astronomers began to believe that the universe was expanding. Hoyle’s steady-state cosmology was one model of an expanding universe. However, a rival cosmology emerged to account for the expanding universe, which Hoyle disparagingly dismissed as the “big bang.” The big bang theory proposes that billions of years ago the entire universe was compressed into a single point that exploded. The energy released from that explosion produced the four forces that govern the universe (gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force), as well as elementary particles, atoms, galaxies, stars, and planets. The initial explosion was so strong that it continues to cause the universe to expand to the present day. The big bang theory suggests that residual radiation from that explosion should pervade the cosmos even now. Around the time Hawking wrote his doctoral dissertation, the radiation was discovered. This caused most physicists to reject Hoyle’s steady state. In his dissertation, Hawking suggested that the entire universe was originally a singularity like a black hole and that the big bang could be understood by comparing the universe to a star collapsing into a black hole. Hawking’s analogy reversed the time sequence of a compressing star: the universe explodes from a singularity rather than imploding into one.

One of the most serious problems in twentieth-century physics is that its two main theories, relativity and quantum mechanics, appear to be incompatible. Black holes are predicted by relativity, which implies that they should emit no energy. In the 1970s, Hawking began to wonder if he could reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics by applying quantum mechanics to black holes. He found that according to quantum mechanics, black holes would indeed emit energy, a phenomenon since known as Hawking radiation, and would eventually explode. Hence, if the universe prior to the big bang was analogous to a black hole, it would one day burst like a black hole; therefore, the big bang could be explained by combining relativity and quantum mechanics. This means that the primordial universe as well as black holes can be understood by laws of mathematics and science and neither are really singularities. In a 2005 journal article, Hawking modified his theory of black holes to allow that information is never truly lost inside them and is eventually released into the universe again, if in garbled form. In 2014 he called his theory of information being lost in black holes his "biggest blunder."

Hawking came to believe that the universe was continuous and governed by a single set of laws. This would not mean that all events were predictable because a comprehensive theory of the universe would still contain Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Hawking cautioned that even if humans knew all the laws that underlie the operation of the universe, an account of all possible occurrences would require knowing the history of every particle, something clearly impossible within finite time.

Modern physics believes that the universe is governed by the four forces of gravity (which binds the planets, stars, and galaxies together), electromagnetism (which binds the atom together), the strong nuclear force (which holds the atomic nucleus together), and the weak nuclear force (which is necessary to account for radioactive decay). Einstein spent his later years unsuccessfully searching for a “grand unified theory,” a single set of equations that would account for all four forces. Hawking was convinced that Einstein failed because he did not incorporate quantum mechanics. According to Hawking, the place in time to search for the grand unified theory is the time of the big bang, when, according to Hawking and other physicists, the four forces were one.

The universe assumed the shape it did because of the particular way energy happened to have been distributed at the time of the big bang. With slight differences, the galaxies and stars might never have developed. Indeed, the big bang may have produced regions where space, matter, and energy assumed different forms. Hawking proposed that the result could be an infinite number of “baby universes” and that the universe in which humans live may be only one of many possibilities.

The ultimate fate of the universe may depend upon how much matter it contains. If it contains only the matter that astronomers can see with visible light, then the universe should expand forever. If there is more matter, the universe will eventually contract and ultimately collapse into a single point. Hawking hypothesized that black holes may have formed not only out of imploding stars but also from residues of the big bang. If that is true, black holes may pervade the universe, and there may be enough invisible matter to one day reverse its expansion. Long after the universe again congeals into a single point, it will again explode and expand. Hence, the universe would have a continual history whose broad outline is predictable. If Hawking is correct, then the dream of physics, a single set of laws to explain the development of the universe and all its contents, is indeed attainable.

In 2012, another of Hawking's long-held assumptions was proven false, when researchers Peter Higgs and Francois Englert discovered evidence for the existence of the Higgs boson (colloquially called the "God particle"), which, first theorized in 1964, is believed to give all elementary particles their mass. Hawking had wagered that the Higgs boson would never be found and that physicists would be required to reexamine the fundamental laws of the universe in light of unexpected experimental results. Consequently, he was rather disappointed at the 2012 discovery and encouraged the physics community to pursue other, little-explored areas of research, such as experiments on the M theory of the universe.

Hawking became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1979, a professorship once occupied by Newton, and he is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College. Believing that the public should be kept informed about scientific theory, in 1988, he published A Brief History of Time, a popular book about the intellectual history of cosmology. To the surprise of all, it remained a best seller for 237 weeks, and it sold more than nine million copies.

Other popular books followed: Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993), The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), A Briefer History of Time (2005), God Created Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History (2005), and The Grand Design (2010). Hawking also cowrote an illustrated children's book series with his daughter Lucy—George's Secret Key to the Universe (2009), George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt (2011), and George and the Big Bang (2013)—and penned an autobiography, My Brief History (2013).

In 1985, Hawking had to have an emergency tracheotomy after suffering from pneumonia. He then required round-the-clock nursing care, and he lost his ability to speak. A computer system was built for him that enabled him to speak with an electronic voice with an American English accent. He could control the system with his little finger, by blinking to activate an infrared sensor, or by twitching his cheek. He wrote of his condition,

I am quite often asked: How do you feel about having ALS? The answer is, not a lot. I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many.

Many awards and honors came to Hawking for his work in science. He was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982 and companion of honor in 1989. He was a member of the Royal Society, an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States. He received the Eddington Medal (1975), the Hughes (1976) and Copley medals (2006) of the Royal Society, the Albert Einstein Medal (1979), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1988), Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord (1989), the Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society (1999), the Michelson Morley Award (2003), the Smithson Bicentennial Medal (2005), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009), and the Fundamental Physics Prize (2012). Hawking was also awarded a dozen honorary degrees.

Hawking also was a popular public speaker. In addition to physics, he often discussed his worries about the dangers to humanity’s future from disease, nuclear weapons, and global warming. By 2006, he feared that global warming might already have proceeded too far to reverse and that humanity’s chance for long-term survival might require colonizing other planets. In 2013, he urged further space exploration, stating that he believed humanity could not survive another thousand years on earth.

Hawking considered his own work incomplete. However, as he suggested, science is never complete: it is supposed to be self-critical and forever subject to revision.

Hawking was the director of research at Cambridge's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology and was the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He continued to travel the world giving lectures, actively pursue his research at Cambridge, and mentor a group of graduate students throughout his later life.

Stephen and Jane Hawking divorced in 1991. He was married to Elaine Mason, a nurse, from 1995 to 2006. He had three children and three grandchildren. To celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday in 2007, he took a trip on a specially designed plane that allowed him to float in zero gravity. In 2011, Hawking participated in a trial of the iBrain, a single-channel brain monitor mounted on a headband that might one day help Hawking and other ALS patients communicate more easily. In 2014, he wrote about artificial intelligence, specifically noting the dangers of such technology. The 2014 biographical film The Theory of Everything was based on a memoir by Hawking's ex-wife Jane about their life together; it was critically acclaimed and received three BAFTA Awards and two Golden Globes as well as an Academy Award for Best Actor for its star Eddie Redmayne.

In July 2015, Hawking, along with tech billionaire Yuri Milner, launched a $100 million program, the Breakthrough Initiative, to search for extraterrestrial life. In May 2016, he hosted a PBS program, Genius by Stephen Hawking, which purported to "teach normal people to think like a genius." At the 2016 Pride of Britain Awards, he received a lifetime achievement award for his contribution to science and British culture. Also in 2016, the annually-awarded Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication was founded to honor those who make science accessible to laypeople through writing, film, and other media.

Hawking appeared as the voice of the titular guide in the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Hexagonal Phase in 2018; that year he also appeared in the Smithsonian Channel documentary Leaving Earth: Or How to Colonize a Planet. The documentary premiered after Hawking's death on March 14, 2018. Hawking lived to be seventy-six years old—fifty-three years longer than his doctor estimated when he was first diagnosed with ALS—and died at his home in Cambridge on the 139th anniversary of Einstein's birth. Hawking's legacy was commemorated at Westminster Abbey on June 15, 2018, and his remains were interred alongside the graves of Newton and naturalist Sir Charles Darwin in the abbey nave. Later that year, his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions was posthumously published. The year 2019 saw the Event Horizon Telescope capture the first image of a black hole, providing visual evidence of their existence, as well as a research team experimentally observe stationary Hawking radiation by simulating a black hole in a lab.

In 2021, in addition to the release of the documentary Hawking: Can You Hear Me? featuring personal interviews with his family, Hawking's work was once again a prominent topic when Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicists published the findings of a black hole study using gravitational waves. By organizing data received about black hole collisions, the scientists reported observationally confirming Hawking's area theorem regarding black holes with 95 percent certainty. That same year, journalist and historian Charles Seife published the biography Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity.

Significance

Hawking’s theories led to a reassessment of Einstein’s reworking of Newton’s theory. Newton’s theory had served as the foundation of physics for more than two centuries. Hawking, in turn, would not have developed his model had Einstein not preceded him, nor would Einstein have produced relativity without Newton’s prior framework. The ideal for scientists is to build on each other’s work. Modern scientific truths could become the scientific “errors” of the future, but these truths (and errors) nevertheless are foundational for future work in the sciences. As Newton famously admitted, “I can see far because I stand on the shoulders of giants.” Hawking proved to be another “layer” in a pyramid of giants.

There are critics who charge that Hawking simply was one of a number of scientists who tried to unify physics and to explain the development of the universe and that his disability is the focus of the media. Even if true, the claim cannot take away Hawking’s actual accomplishments in physics and astronomy while living with ALS. Einstein, Bertrand Russell (who revised mathematics and worked for world peace), and Linus Pauling (who won Nobel Prizes in chemistry and peace) are remembered not only as great scientists but also as great humanitarians. Hawking, too, was a great scientist and a great humanitarian. His life story inspires those of all physical ability levels.

Bibliography

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