Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work

by Kitty Ferguson

  By the end of my visit that evening we had sorted out plans. Hawking would tell his personal assistant to supply me with childhood and family photographs and with material he had written about his childhood and his disability that had never been published. In May or June, when I had completed the science sections of the book, he would go over those with me.

  The precipice gives way

  Life at the focus of as much attention and adulation as Hawking was receiving inevitably takes on an unnatural cast. It isn’t easy to keep things in perspective, no matter how levelheaded and grown-up you are or how good a sense of humour you have about yourself. For a quarter of a century Hawking had been convincing people that he was not subhuman. He’d succeeded too well. He’d convinced them he was superhuman. He had never deliberately encouraged this idea. He said he refused to be treated as less or more than simply human. But critics pointed out that he’d actually done precious little to discourage the superhero image. To be fair, who would have? It was fun and it sold books. Besides, what good did it do to try to discourage it? When he made statements like ‘I get embarrassed when people call it courage; I’ve just done the only thing open to me in the situation’,1 some took it as false modesty and others as one more example of heroism.

  Hawking began openly shouldering, more than previously, the responsibility of being a role model for disabled people. In a speech before an occupational science conference at the University of Southern California in June 1990 he sounded almost militant. ‘It is very important that disabled children should be helped to blend with others of the same age. It determines their self-image. How can one feel a member of the human race if one is set apart from an early age? It is a form of apartheid.’ He said he counted himself lucky that his disease struck him fairly late, after he’d spent his childhood with able-bodied friends, engaged in normal physical games. He praised the mechanical advances that have helped him. But he went on to say that although ‘aids like wheelchairs and computers can play an important role in overcoming physical deficiencies, the right mental attitude is even more important. It is no use complaining about the public’s attitude about the disabled. It is up to disabled people to change people’s awareness in the same way that blacks and women have changed public perceptions.’2 Even Hawking’s critics couldn’t deny that he had gone further than almost anyone else in history towards changing that awareness.

  While Hawking ranged all over the world giving talks, receiving honours, holding press conferences, and enjoying the general adulation, more and more frequently accompanied by Elaine Mason, Cambridge friends watched their ‘resident supercelebrity’ with indulgence and delight, but also with mounting concern. They begrudged him none of the fun, but they worried about him. Was he beginning to believe the ‘master of the universe’ image? Would celebrity crowd out his scientific work? Mixed with his natural stubbornness, was it making him a wilful prima donna? Would an exalted self-image affect his family? Would the marriage that had endured so much adversity be able to survive? The public likes to own its heroes. Could Stephen ever be just Stephen again? It seemed unlikely.

  Jane Hawking’s relationship with Jonathan Hellyer Jones was still known to only a handful of very discreet people and news of it had not reached the wider world or the media – an astounding achievement in a town and university community as small as Cambridge. However, Jane had sounded an ominous note in an interview in 1989: ‘I started with great optimism. Stephen was then infected with that optimism. His determination has now rather outstripped mine. I cannot keep up with him. I do think he tends to overcompensate for his condition by doing absolutely everything that comes to his notice.’3 That ‘everything’ had grown out of all proportion. Jane felt it was a tremendous victory that he was able to live at home and have a fairly normal life. Stephen Hawking wanted much more. There were more doors open to him, more possibilities, than he had ever dreamed of or could ever hope to explore; more demands on his time than he could ever hope to meet.

  All these activities and the adulation and awards were distancing him from his family. Increasingly they were carving out lives of their own, separate from his. Robert and Lucy were actively trying to be independent and move out of his shadow. Jane rarely accompanied him in his travels and public appearances. She sought escape in her teaching and her garden and in books and music. Her voice lessons had borne fruit and she had become a valued member of a top-flight Cambridge choir, often singing soprano solos. There were other friends besides Jonathan who shared her religious faith. Her role in Stephen’s life had changed. It was, she said, no longer to encourage a sick husband. It was ‘simply to tell him that he’s not God’.4

  For twenty-five years Stephen and Jane Hawking together seemed to nearly everyone to have handled adversity magnificently. Again and again Stephen had spoken of their relationship as the mainstay of his life and his success. The Master of the Universe television special in 1989 ended with a picture of the two of them watching their sleeping child, Tim, and Hawking saying, ‘One really can’t ask for more.’ The Hawkings’ public image had continued to reaffirm that life on the edge of the precipice was, for all its problems, a beautiful life.

  In the spring of 1990 the precipice that had been weakening from within for several years crumbled in a way few people had ever expected it would. What had seemed to me a fairly smoothly humming operation on Silver Street when I talked with Hawking the previous December had become, when I visited again with my completed science chapters in the early summer of 1990, frenetic and unhappy. I spent a week conversing with Hawking and having him vet my chapters, aware that for some reason the mood in the department, especially among the staff and those faculty members closest to him, and with Hawking himself, was tense, on a knife edge.

  Finally, a mutual friend who knew Jane Hawking well cleared up the mystery. Stephen had told Jane that he was leaving her for Elaine Mason. Even with media attention bordering on paparazzi, the Hawkings had kept their secrets so well that I, who had been interviewing him and was writing a book about him, could hardly believe the news. It seemed a tragic end to what most had thought was a beautiful, heroic marriage. To stalwarts who had been closest to Hawking the break-up had been no surprise. A couple of his most trusted staff had resigned, unwilling to deal with the turmoil of his disintegrating marriage and his new relationship with Elaine. Sue Masey was struggling to keep things moving ahead on an even keel.

  The Hawkings separated just short of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Except for a brief mention to the press that autumn that he had left his wife but did not rule out the possibility of a reconciliation, neither Stephen nor Jane Hawking made any public statement. It was symptomatic of the love and respect Hawking’s friends and colleagues have for him that in a town where gossip moves like wildfire the news was very slow in spreading. As it did, a widening circle of acquaintances in Cambridge and all over the world reacted to it as a tragedy. The disintegration of marriages was commonplace, but Hawking and the Hawking marriage had seemed so very un-commonplace. At first, opinion turned strongly against him for leaving the wife who had supported him so courageously. Not until Jane Hawking published her memoirs in the late 1990s did a more balanced picture emerge, and it finally became known that the marriage had, in truth, been troubled for years.

  Hawking moved out of the house on West Road, and he and Elaine took up residence in Pinehurst, an attractive, upmarket, rather secluded cluster of homes and flats not far away in Grange Road. In the early nineties Elaine sometimes skateboarded back to that home after delivering her boys to school.

  Hawking had relinquished one of the pillars he had always said supported his life: his family. Was another such pillar, his scientific work, also in danger of collapse?

  The Lucasian Lecture – Revisited

  Though some feared the personal turmoil in Hawking’s life would undermine his scientific work, he continued to express his devotion to his science. He said he was ‘itching to get on with it’. Was it still possibl
e that he might be the physicist to fit it all together in the Theory of Everything, as the media had been prophesying?

  Hawking’s work wasn’t in the newer mainstream of that effort: superstring theory. However, mainstreams in physics shift overnight, and a mind somewhat set apart may spot the connection that makes several streams converge into one complete theory. There were murmurs that by theoretical physics standards Hawking was already well over the hill. It’s young people who usually make the great discoveries. A freshness of mind is required, a passionate, brash approach mixed with a certain amount of naivety. But Hawking certainly still had all of that. It would have been a profound mistake to rule him out on those grounds.

  Would he live long enough? His illness was still progressing but very slowly. Did he worry about dying before he finishes his work? In 1990 he replied to that question by saying that he never looks that far ahead. He’s lived with the possibility of imminent death for so long that he isn’t afraid of it. The kind of work he does is a joint effort, and there are plenty of other physicists to carry on with it. He’s never claimed his presence is necessary for the Theory of Everything to be found. ‘But I’m in no hurry to die,’ he added. ‘There’s a lot I want to do first.’5

  In June 1990, ten years after his inaugural lecture as Lucasian Professor, I asked him how he would change his Lucasian lecture, were he to write it over again. Is the end in sight for theoretical physics? Yes, he said. But not by the end of the century. The most promising candidate to unify the forces and particles was no longer the N=8 supergravity he’d spoken of then. It was superstrings, the theory that was explaining the fundamental objects of the universe as tiny, vibrating strings, and proposing that what we had been thinking of as particles are, instead, different ways a fundamental loop of string can vibrate. Superstrings would take a little longer to work out. Give it twenty or twenty-five years, he said.

  I asked him whether he believed his no-boundary proposal might turn out to answer the question, what are the boundary conditions of the universe? He answered yes.

  Hawking said he thought wormhole theory had important implications for a Theory of Everything. Because of wormholes it was probable that neither superstrings nor any other theory would be able to predict such fundamental numbers in the universe as particle charges and masses.

  And if somebody does find the Theory of Everything, what then? According to Hawking, doing physics after that would be like mountaineering after Mount Everest has been conquered. However, Hawking had also said in A Brief History of Time that for humanity as a whole it would be only the beginning, because, although a Theory of Everything would tell us how the universe works and why it is the way it is, it won’t tell us why it exists at all. It would be just a set of rules and equations. He had wondered: ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’ ‘Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?’6 Those, he said, are questions that the usual scientific approach of coming up with mathematical models cannot answer.

  Hawking still longed to know the answers. ‘If I knew that, then I would know everything important’,7 ‘then we would know the mind of God’.8 That was where he had left it at the end of his book, but he had told a television interviewer: ‘I’m not so optimistic about finding why the universe exists.’9 He wasn’t considering the question of whether we necessarily need to find the Theory of Everything in order to know the mind of God, whether there are, as Jane Hawking had suggested, other ways to know God besides in the laws of science.

  Stardom

  In 1990 Hawking received an honorary degree from Harvard University. Those who attended the ceremony and reception remember with fondness that Hawking’s fellow honoree Ella Fitzgerald sang especially for him at the reception.

  New non-academic faces were showing up outside Hawking’s door to read the little plaque, and were being made to wait just as though they were graduate students there for a supervision. It wasn’t a local Cambridge or New York photographer, but Francis Giacobetti, photographer of the Pope and Federico Fellini, whose equipment and assistants crowded that side of the common room. Giacobetti believed the subjects of his portraits were best revealed by their hands, the irises of their eyes and in half-profile, and that was the way he was photographing them for an outdoor exhibition that would open in Paris and then travel around the world. Other subjects were Francis Crick, the novelist García Márquez, the architect I. M. Pei.

  Nor was it just another interview by a television personality that pumped life to a new level of frenetic high energy in the common room and pushed physics discussions into the corners. Steven Spielberg agreed to produce a film version of A Brief History of Time, to be directed by the young Errol Morris.

  Morris was an inspired choice, with an unusual, intellectual, eclectic background. As a precocious ten-year-old he had given lectures on the solar system; as a teenager, played the cello and studied music with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau; as an undergraduate, set records climbing in Yosemite; as a graduate student, rather unhappily done graduate work in science history at Princeton (studying with John Wheeler) and philosophy at Berkeley. None of this had appealed to Morris as his life’s work, but, along the way, he picked up experience that would help him better understand others who did not fit an ordinary mould, such as Stephen Hawking.10

  Although the Berkeley faculty had rejected Morris’s eccentric thesis proposal on the subject of the insanity plea, monster movies and murderers in Wisconsin prisons, his interest in the subject of ‘true crime’ continued after he began to make documentary films. Morris made contact with a man named Randal Adams, who was on death row awaiting execution for the murder of a Dallas policeman. Morris found the verdict questionable and took it upon himself to look into the case personally. He was not unqualified, having worked for several years as a private detective in New York when his film-making career was at a low ebb.11 He documented his investigation of the Adams case on film, and solved it, winning Adams’s release. The Thin Blue Line premiered in 1988 to enormous critical acclaim and elevated Morris to the level of a major documentary film-maker. With good cause, he dubbed himself a ‘director/detective’.12

  It was this interesting, complicated, brilliant young man whom Spielberg brought together with Stephen Hawking for the filming of A Brief History of Time. One of the challenges Morris liked to set himself as a director was ‘how to extract a situation’s truth without violating its mystery’13 and it was with that question in mind that he approached the Hawking project.

  Spielberg’s choice of Morris was partly made in the interest of solving a problem that emerged early on in the development of the film and threatened to doom the project. Hawking envisioned a film that would use all the state-of-the-art science fiction film-making technology and special effects available to Steven Spielberg and his colleagues to bring A Brief History of Time spectacularly to the screen. It seemed the project could not have fallen into better hands. He had no intention of allowing his personal life to be featured. The film-makers, however, argued that the film Hawking had in mind would never draw in the mass audience that both they and Hawking hoped to attract. The film must be biographical. Hawking took the matter up personally with Spielberg. One indomitable will had met another, but finally it was Spielberg who prevailed, by bringing Morris into the project and convincing Hawking that Morris could, as Hawking later wrote, ‘make a film that people would want to watch, but which doesn’t lose sight of the purpose of the book’.14 Morris saw Hawking’s courageous life with severe physical limitations and his bold scientific quest as ‘inseparable themes’.15 He chose to let Hawking narrate the film himself, in his own synthesized voice, and repeatedly filmed him reflected in his computer screen.

  Among the most successful hallmarks of Morris’s previous work had been his genius as an interviewer and his skilful use of talking heads, and Hawking, in an extraordinary capitulation, gave Morris permission to interview his family, friends and scientific col
leagues on film. His permission, however, could not ensure Jane Hawking’s permission. She and their three children are not in the film except in photographs. Elaine Mason also refused to be interviewed, but Gordon Freedman, the executive producer, found she was ‘a wonderful bouncing nurse’ who did ‘cartwheels on the soundstage’.16 Stephen himself would not answer questions or make statements about his personal life in the film. However, Isobel Hawking, Stephen’s mother, agreed to appear, and Hawking, at the premiere, thanked Morris for making his mother a film star.

  In an Afterword to the book published as a ‘companion’ to the film, A Brief History of Time: A Reader’s Companion, Gordon Freedman described the ‘very strong working relationship’ that developed between Hawking and Morris during the three years’ filming first in a London studio and then in Cambridge, when Morris, disappointed at the way the film was turning out, started all over again. ‘In the thick of the editing, Stephen Hawking and Errol Morris could be seen in the edit room for hours on end working toward a single vision for the film.’17

  A Brief History of Time premiered in New York and Los Angeles in August 1992. It won the 1992 Grand Jury Prize for Documentary Filmmaking and the Documentary Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Festival, and the Filmmaker’s Award from the National Society of Film Critics. Philip Gourevitch, writing in The New York Times Magazine, commented perceptively: ‘Morris’s record of Hawking and the people who surround him creates the unexpected impression that he is a normal man who just happens to have the mind of a genius trapped in a devastated body.’18 David Ansen in Newsweek praised the film as ‘an elegant, inspirational and mysterious movie. Morris turns abstract ideas into haunting images, and keeps them spinning in the air with the finesse, and playfulness, of a master juggler.’19 Richard Schickel in Time magazine spoke of its ‘splendid talking heads’ and went on to say, ‘that the metaphorical richness of this hypnotic movie has been accomplished by such simple means is a mark of its excellence’.20