In Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking, Hawking chooses not to disparage belief in God directly. After a stunning series of sequences that show many turning points in the history of the universe where it could so easily have gone wrong, and overwhelming us with the sheer grandeur and elegant genius of it all, he says, in his own voice: ‘Perhaps science has revealed there is some higher authority at work, setting the laws of nature so that our universe and we can exist. So is there a grand designer, who lined up all the good fortune? In my opinion, not necessarily.’28 And he goes on to talk about the anthropic principle and the possibility of many different kinds of universes. His goal seems to be to lay out what we know, and what we surmise, and what his opinion is, and to make his audience as excited, awed and curious about the universe as he is. From there, we’re on our own. He even contradicts the claim made in the subtitle of The Grand Design, that we know the ultimate answers. In the final moments of the documentary, he says, ‘Some day we may solve the ultimate mystery … discover why the universe exists at all.’29 Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking leaves us not only awed by the universe, but also agape at ourselves, us creatures who have actually managed to discover and understand so astonishingly much. But there still remains that question. Errol Morris, director of the film A Brief History of Time, said there was a challenge he always set himself when he made a film: ‘To extract a situation’s truth without violating its mystery.’ Hawking has met that challenge.
This magnificent trilogy, with a splendid musical score, is perhaps close to the dream that was not realized in the film of A Brief History of Time, in spite of Morris’s skills. It is probably what Hawking originally hoped that film would be like, except that in twenty-five years computer animation has vastly improved, and the dream itself has grown exponentially.
2010–2011
Before I began writing this book, I went to visit Hawking in his office in November 2010 for the first time in several years. The room had changed only a little. The large picture of Marilyn was not on the wall but, inexplicably, lying on the floor. The photographs of Lucy’s boy William were still there on the shelves, and there was also a small colour photo of Hawking and Elaine lying among other papers near his computer screen. On the end of his desk nearest the door was a mysterious arrangement of stones in a large flat dish, emitting a faint vapour that seems to have no smell, unusual in that it emerges from the stones in flat, wing-like gauzy clouds that look as though they have a tiny hem at the edge. Judith Croasdell, Hawking’s personal assistant, explained that it is a special kind of humidifier, chosen several years ago by Elaine, that makes it easier for Hawking to breathe. The liquid required for it is not ordinary water, and a large supply of bottles takes up a good part of the storage space under the side window. Outside that window is the ‘pavilion’ that was not yet built in 2000, but it doesn’t spoil the view. The office has a tranquil, happy feeling to it.
My conversation with Hawking took place as usual with both of us sitting behind his desk facing his computer screen. Hawking was controlling the cursor on the screen by moving his cheek muscle. A small electronic beep came from the contraption attached to the back of his chair when he made a choice on the screen.
The computer program on the screen looked the same, but he also has the option of using another program. I could not tell how he was making the word choices on that one, and, in fact, it didn’t seem to be operating very well for him. His writing speed had slowed down considerably. I was told that if the cheek or eye movement ceases to work there are other possibilities, including direct connections to the brain. He will deal with that if and when it becomes absolutely necessary. Not every bit of communication requires the computer. If he raises his eyebrows, that means yes. Mouth down means no. You can still tell when he is smiling. Hawking recently had surgery for cataracts and probably doesn’t even really need to wear glasses now, but still does.
During our conversation the window blinds suddenly went down by themselves as it got darker outside. I had forgotten that such things happen automatically in this ultra-sophisticated building. The nurses changed shift. The one whose shift was ending – a dignified, gentle woman – came over and said goodbye to him without expecting a reply.
Whenever I talk with Stephen Hawking I try to phrase my questions in ways that allow him to answer with a simple yes or no, though he usually goes on to elaborate anyway. That afternoon I was particularly interested in asking him about what seemed a possible change in his views about independent reality (reflected in The Grand Design) since we discussed that in 1996. I quoted him the words he had used back then: ‘We never have a model-independent view of reality. But that doesn’t mean there is no model-independent reality. If I didn’t think there is, I couldn’t go on doing science.’ I asked him whether he would change that now to say, ‘Independent reality is that there is no independent reality.’ His answer was ‘I still think there is an underlying reality, it is just that our picture of it is model-dependent.’30
A Swipe at Immortality
In an interview in the Guardian31 and a lecture at a ‘Google Zeitgeist’ meeting in London in the spring of 2011, Hawking bluntly revealed part of his own personal picture of reality. His headlined words were ‘There is no heaven or afterlife … that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.’ Hawking was, of course, expressing an opinion regarding something about which no one, including himself, has any scientifically provable knowledge whatsoever either for or against, but he explained his position by stating his own view of the human brain. One school of thought among researchers who study the brain sees the brain as a computer and the ‘mind’ as nothing more than a product of it, and Hawking apparently had decided to join this club. ‘I regard the brain,’ he said, ‘as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers.’ Ergo, no heaven or afterlife for us.
In reply to the interview question ‘How should we live?’, Hawking said, ‘We should seek the greatest value of our action.’
There were, not surprisingly, numerous responses to Hawking’s interview. Although some read it as a declaration of atheism, others pointed out that his statement was about belief in human immortality, not about belief in God. Not everyone who believes there is a God also believes in heaven or an afterlife. Other readers noted that it is often possible to transfer the entire intellectual content of a computer to a new computer or even a ‘memory stick’ as an old computer dies, and asked facetiously whether this might represent a sort of transmigration of the soul.
The Guardian printed one thoughtful response in full, even though it was longer than the original interview article itself.32 The respondent, Michael Wenham, like Hawking, has ALS. ‘For someone “facing the prospect of an early death”,’ Wenham wrote, ‘with probably an unpleasant prelude, the idea of extinction holds no more fear than sleep. It really is insulting to accuse me of believing there might be life after death because I’m afraid of the dark.’ Wenham called Hawking’s statement ‘both sad and misinformed. Openness to the theoretical possibility of there being 11 dimensions and fundamental particles “as yet undiscovered” shows an intellectual humility strangely at odds with writing off the possibility of other dimensions of existence.’
Wenham ended his response: ‘I can’t prove it of course, but on good grounds I’d stake my life on it, that beyond death will be another great adventure; but first I have to finish this one.’
Perhaps Stephen Hawking is up for another bet?
Going On
Hawking currently has two graduate students, and he still holds court in the common room at teatime, for there is now a common room only a short distance from Hawking’s office door, around the curve in the corridor, past the lift. A sign over the entrance reads ‘Potter Room’, but officially it is the ‘Centre for Theoretical Cosmology’ and is used not only at teatime but for meetings, lectures and conferences. The room is large and pleasant, with low tables, chairs and a c
ounter for serving food and beverages in one corner, dimly lit as the common room in Silver Street was for most of the day. Large black chalk-boards – something the old common room lacked – cover a good part of two walls. I have never seen them without equations scribbled on them. In one corner of the room a bust of Hawking – the Director of Research for the Centre – stands on a plinth. It is a splendid likeness by the sculptor Ian Walters.
Hawking still lives in the large house that he built for himself and Elaine. He still goes often to concerts and the opera, especially Wagner – Tannhäuser planned for the next week at Covent Garden, when I visited him in November – though he hasn’t been to Bayreuth recently. He still travels, when possible by private jet. In January 2011, he was once again at Caltech. When he attended a play in Los Angeles, 33 Variations, in which Jane Fonda portrayed a musicologist in the early stages of ALS, Fonda seemed, in news reports, as thrilled to meet him as many fans would be to meet Jane Fonda. In March 2011, I had to rush to get a set of questions to Hawking before he headed back across the Atlantic to a conference at ‘Cook’s Branch’ near Houston, Texas, a rural conference centre in a nature reserve where physicists from around the world gather yearly for meetings, eager to see one another, eager to sink their teeth into theoretical questions that leave the rest of us gaping, eager to rough it a bit, sleeping in bungalows with lazily turning ceiling fans.
In Cambridge, and when he visits Seattle or Arizona, where Lucy spends part of her time, Hawking’s family – now including three grandchildren (Lucy’s William, and Robert and Katrina’s two children), and Jane and Jane’s husband Jonathan – are comfortable with him. There is the new closeness to Lucy that developed when they wrote their books together. In an interview in April 2011, Hawking was asked, if time travel were possible, what moment in his own past he would revisit, what was the best moment of all. His answer was: ‘I would go back to 1967, and the birth of my first child, Robert. My three children have brought me great joy.’33 His mother Isobel, at the time of writing, is still alive, well into her nineties, and still orders him about occasionally. She has said, frankly:
Not all the things Stephen says probably are to be taken as gospel truth. He’s a searcher, he is looking for things. And if sometimes he may talk nonsense, well, don’t we all? The point is, people must think, they must go on thinking, they must try to extend the boundaries of knowledge; yet they don’t sometimes even know where to start. You don’t know where the boundaries are, do you?34
John Wheeler called those boundaries, those frontiers not just of science but of human knowledge, ‘the flaming ramparts of the world’. And, yes, we do know where those are. Not only somewhere out there in the distance. They fill our world.
As Hawking has said about his own adventures on the ramparts:
With hindsight it might appear that there had been a grand and premeditated design to address the outstanding problems concerning the origin and evolution of the universe. But it was not really like that. I did not have a master plan; rather I followed my nose and did whatever looked interesting and possible at the time.35
Stephen Hawking returned to Cambridge from Texas and Arizona – where he had been visiting Lucy and William – in mid-April 2011, on the day I finished writing this book. Joan Godwin went over to cook him something to eat. His office was all set for him, the stones were emitting their vapour. ‘The Boss’ was back, ready to go on with his adventures as long as his health and his ability to communicate hold out … a child who has never grown up … still asking how and why questions … occasionally finding an answer that satisfies him … for a while.
‘An ordinary English boyhood’ – Highgate and St Albans.
Frank Hawking with newborn son Stephen
Stephen and his sisters Philippa and Mary
Proud owner of a new bicycle
On holiday with Philippa and Mary on the steps of the family’s gypsy caravan.
‘Not a grey man’ – undergraduate days at Oxford.
Success on the river as cox of his college boat
Carousing at a Boat Club party (Stephen is waving the handkerchief).
‘Happier than I’d been before’ – early 1960s in Cambridge.
With his mother, Isobel, using his umbrella for a cane
A page from his Ph.D. dissertation, with equations written in his own hand
The churchyard and house in Little St Mary’s Lane
Holding his baby son, Robert.
Stephen and Jane Hawking on their wedding day
‘I have a beautiful family’ – 1970s.
The house in West Road
At the door in a state-of-the-art wheelchair
With Lucy, Jane and Robert
Chess with Robert.
Tim, a new addition in the family sandbox, with Robert, Lucy, Stephen and Jane
Jane’s new passion: music.
‘International calibre.’
In the spring of 1983 shortly before he lost his ability to speak, with research student Chris Hull, who is listening intently to understand his words
Homeward bound along the path through King’s College, accompanied by Don Page
Tea with colleagues and students in Cambridge.
With his personal assistant Judy Fella in his Cambridge DAMTP office
In the rain on King’s Parade, with nurse Elaine Mason.
‘I have written a bestseller!’ – late 1980s.
The Stephen Hawking fan club in Chicago celebrates A Brief History of Time
With colleagues in a bar in Berkeley, California, demonstrating the first version (monitor still only taped together) of his computer speech programme
With Roger Penrose and Kip Thorne.
‘On the shoulders of giants’ – 1980.
Receiving the coveted Israeli Wolf prize.
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, with the statue of former holder of the title Isaac Newton in Trinity College, Cambridge.
Recognition, 1989.
The honorary degree procession in Cambridge, with Robert, Jane and Tim (wearing Stephen’s hat)
With Jane at Buckingham Palace for the Companion of Honour investiture.
Celebrity, the early 1990s.
Stephen and his mother, Isobel, celebrate his inclusion in the Guinness Book of World Records
At Steven Spielberg’s home with Spielberg and nurse Joan Godwin
A scene in his office from the film of A Brief History of Time.
In the media, 1990s.
Starring on The Simpsons
With an animated Al Gore, Michelle Nichols and Gary Gygax in the TV series Futurama
Winning the Star Trek poker game.
Stephen and Elaine on their wedding day in 1995
Recording the second bet about naked singularities at Caltech with John Preskill and Kip Thorne, 1997.
A new millennium.
On Easter Island, 2008
In Antarctica, 1997
The zero-gravity flight, 2007
‘Marilyn’ shows up at Hawking’s sixtieth birthday party.
With the great and the good.
With daughter Lucy, receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom award from US President Barack Obama
With his three children Tim, Robert and Lucy at the White House.
In South Africa with Nelson Mandela
chatting with Queen Elizabeth in the Chelsea Flower Show ‘Stephen Hawking Garden for Motor Neurone Disease’
Cambridge, twenty-first century.
The Centre for Mathematical Sciences, new home of the DAMTP
Hawking ensconced in his high-tech corner office with the dish of stones visible on the corner of his desk and photos of himself in zero gravity prominently displayed.
Hawking ensconced in his high-tech corner office with the dish of stones visible on the corner of his desk and photos of himself in zero gravity prominently displayed.
Unveiling the Time Eater clock at Corpus Christi College, with the clock’s inventor John C Taylor
/> The bust by sculptor Ian Walters in the new common room.
Scaling ‘the flaming ramparts of the world’. Stephen Hawking and cellist Yo-Yo Ma on stage at the World Science Festival Opening Night Gala at Lincoln Center, New York City, in June 2010.
Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work Page 36
