by John Gribbin
The Gravity Research Foundation runs an annual competition for articles describing new research into the nature of gravity. Until the 1970s, it had been almost exclusively a domestic U.S. competition, with very few entries from abroad, although it had once been won by an expatriate Briton living in the United States. Then, with his last contribution to academia, one of us (J.G.) won the prize in 1970. So when Stephen Hawking won the same prize a year or two later for an essay describing black holes, J.G. quickly sent him a congratulatory note. It was nice, the note said, to see Hawking’s name on the list of prizewinners because this added to the prestige of the award and gave previous winners a chance to bask in the reflected glory. “I don’t know about the prestige,” Hawking wrote in reply, “but the money’s very welcome.”
The “official” version of the exploding-black-hole story appeared first in Nature on March 1, 1974.4 While the Gravity Research Foundation essay carried the dogmatic title “Black Holes Aren’t Black,” the Nature paper, uncharacteristically for Hawking, was equivocally headed “Black Hole Explosions?” It sparked a furious debate, as we saw in Chapter 8, with some opponents of the idea suggesting that this time Hawking really was talking rubbish. John Taylor and Paul Davies, of King’s College in London, combined to produce a retort in the issue of Nature dated July 5, 1974,5 headed “Do Black Holes Really Explode?” and answered their own question with an unequivocal “No.” Even Taylor and Davies, though, were soon persuaded that they were wrong and Hawking was right.
More important even than the specific idea that black holes explode was the underlying basis for this discovery—that quantum physics and relativity could be fruitfully combined to give us new insights into the workings of the Universe. Soon Hawking would be using that insight to focus, once more, on the puzzle of the singularity at the beginning of time. But it seems, with hindsight, singularly appropriate that his election as a fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s highest academic honor, should have come in the spring of 1974, within a few weeks of the publication of the Nature version of the exploding-black-hole paper. Ten years after being given just two years to live, however (and scarcely five years after the deterioration that had seemed likely to cut short his promising career), Hawking’s research was really getting into its stride. In the second half of the 1970s, he moved on to investigate the origin of the Universe itself, going back to the beginning of time.
10
THE FOOTHILLS OF FAME
Reflecting on his achievements during the first thirty-two years of his life, Stephen Hawking must have felt a deep sense of pride in what he had accomplished. The 1970s were the years when he established himself as a world-class physicist, and they marked the beginning of five decades of startling success in the disparate worlds of arcane research and popular writing.
Soon after becoming a fellow of the Royal Society, Hawking was invited to spend a year away from Cambridge at Caltech, in Pasadena. The research year, funded by a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholarship, was to study cosmology with the eminent American theoretician Kip Thorne.
Pasadena is a leafy suburb of Los Angeles, nestling up against the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast of Hollywood. The wide boulevards intersecting the district are lined with grand old houses, and in the heyday of Hollywood it was a favorite haunt of film stars. The main street, Colorado Boulevard, was immortalized in the Jan and Dean song “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and there has been no shortage of celebrity names who have taken up residence there over the decades. However, in the summer Pasadena is one of the smoggiest areas of Los Angeles because the mountains inhibit the escape of ozone. If a Stage 2 Smog Alert is sounded, citizens are advised to stay indoors unless on essential business, and the authorities have the power to make industry and commerce temporarily shut down. Smog-alert warnings are broadcast on the radio, and illuminated signs are switched on over freeways. Perhaps the American Indians displayed great powers of premonition when, long before white men arrived, they named the region “Valley of the Smokes.”
Caltech itself is unique in that, for such a prestigious institution, it is tiny. In the mid-seventies it was home to no more than fifteen hundred students and was a tenth the size of colleges with comparable reputations such as Harvard or Yale. But despite its small size, Caltech is the West Coast’s mecca for science and technology. Throughout its history, it has attracted the leading people in their fields from all over the world. Nobel Prize–winning physicist Robert Millikan arrived there in the twenties and was frequently visited by Albert Einstein. Money simply pours into the place from benefactors ranging from private individuals fascinated with scientific research to multinationals such as IBM and Wang. With some of the best telescopes in the world a matter of miles away on Mount Wilson and the massive Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a gargantuan “annex” dwarfing the mother campus, it has everything a scientist could wish for.
Some of the world’s best physicists were based at Caltech in the seventies. Kip Thorne headed the relativity group there, and the charismatic Nobel laureate Richard Feynman still taught there and played bongos in college bands during the evenings. Academic quality aside, the contrast between Caltech and Caius could not have been starker. The buildings making up the campus, although tastefully designed and constructed in sand-colored stone, are all Spanish-style, light and airy, with the nine-story Millikan Library block rising at the center. Those admitted to Caltech are among the very best students in the country, and they are driven hard. There is very little social life on campus, and the suicide rate among students ranks almost as high as its academic reputation. Having said that, there was no shortage of colorful characters around the place at the time of Hawking’s sabbatical.
Feynman, a physics professor, had already acquired a formidable reputation as an amiable eccentric and once took on the local authorities who were trying to close down a topless bar in Pasadena. In court he claimed that he frequently used the place to work on his physics. Feynman and Hawking shared an offbeat sense of humor, and although their work rarely overlapped, they had a lot of time for each other. Both men have achieved international fame as scientists and live-wire characters, and each has acquired cult status in the wider world outside his own discipleship of graduate students and fascinated laypeople. When Feynman died of cancer in 1988, the whole of Caltech mourned and the global village of science felt the loss.
Kip Thorne, now viewed as the West Coast’s relativity guru, favors floral shirts, beads, and shoulder-length gray hair. He introduced Hawking to another physicist who was to play a significant role in collaborations and become one of Hawking’s lifelong friends—Don Page. Page, who was born in Alaska and graduated from a small college in Missouri, was working on his Ph.D. at the time of Hawking’s visit. The two of them immediately hit it off, and before Hawking’s year at Caltech was over they had written a black-hole paper together.
The family was excited by the move. Jane organized all the details, booking airline tickets, packing, and arranging schedules, as well as managing to transport a severely disabled husband and two young children to the other side of the world almost single-handedly. At Caltech, Hawking was treated with the respect he should have received at his own college in Cambridge. Wooden ramps were fitted against the curbs in the vicinity of his office so that he could get around easily in his wheelchair, and he was provided with an office and every aid and resource he would need to help him with his research. The work was satisfying, and he found collaboration with Thorne’s team both stimulating and scientifically rewarding. Jane and the children enjoyed the Southern California climate. Despite the air pollution, noise, and traffic congestion of Los Angeles, the beaches and the blue Pacific made a welcome change from the often monotonous lifestyle and erratic weather of Cambridgeshire.
With her blond hair, four-year-old Lucy was the epitome of the California flower child and loved the place. Robert had to continue with his schooling, but there was plenty of time for the family to be together and do at least some
of the things they enjoyed back home. Within Caltech’s cloistered environment, the family was sheltered from the extremes Los Angeles had to offer and, moving in privileged academic circles, Pasadena was not unlike the coziness of Cambridge—but with sunshine. Jane took the children to Disneyland, and Stephen joined them to travel around Southern California when he could take time off from his research. Friends and colleagues would often visit. They took trips in rented cars to Palm Springs and resorts along the coast, as well as getting to see a little more of America between duties at Pasadena.
Back in Britain, the government had finally agreed to join the European Common Market by the end of the decade and oil had begun to flow from the North Sea rigs. It seemed that the early-seventies gloom of strikes, power cuts, and the three-day week may at last have begun to lift. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts shook hands hundreds of miles above a burning Cambodia. Returning to England in 1975, the family was ready for changes and improvements in their own lives.
It often takes a protracted change of lifestyle to highlight the alterations that can be made when things return to the old routine, and the Hawkings saw immediately that they did not want to go back to the old pattern of life in Cambridge. In some ways they were glad to be back home. The countryside was greener, the weather less predictable, the television less obtrusive, and the tea tasted as God had ordained it to taste. But the simple fact was that, having experienced the comforts of California, they were no longer prepared to put up with some of the inconveniences of their lives in Cambridge.
The first thing that hit them was that, quaint and nostalgic as it may have been, the house in Little St. Mary’s Lane was far too small for them. Stephen was finding it impossible to use the stairs, and it was too cramped for a family of four. Hawking asked the college to help them find somewhere more suitable for their needs. On this occasion, the authorities were more than willing to come to their assistance. As Hawking puts it, “By this time, the College appreciated me rather more, and there was a different Bursar.”1
They were offered a ground-floor flat in a large Victorian house owned by the college, on West Road, not far from the gate of King’s College and a mere ten minutes’ wheelchair ride from the DAMTP. The house had a large garden, regularly tended by college gardeners who kept it in a permanent state of elegance. The children loved it, and there was never a problem about their playing on the lawns, an informal truce with the gardeners having been established. Wide doorways made it easy for Hawking to maneuver his wheelchair around the entire flat, and because it was all on one level he no longer had to struggle upstairs to get to the bedroom.
By 1974, Hawking was having difficulty getting in and out of bed and feeding himself. Until their return from the States, Jane had been Stephen’s unpaid, twenty-four-hours-a-day nurse, as well as his wife. She had, of course, been fully aware of the responsibilities expected of her when she decided to marry Stephen in 1965, but the effort of bringing up two young children and running the home as well as looking after her husband was beginning to take its toll on her emotional well-being. They decided to invite one of Hawking’s research students to live with them on West Road. The flat was big enough for another adult, and in return for free accommodation the student would help Jane look after Stephen.
The system worked well. In fact, as Hawking’s prestige grew it was considered an honor and a good career move to become his “student-in-residence.” It was inevitable that close bonds were established between the young research assistant and his mentor. While Jane received much-needed help, the student gained a closer insight into Hawking’s mind, and some of his genius was bound to rub off. At least that was the theory. There was, of course, another side to this: as Hawking himself has said, “It was hard for a student to be in awe of his professor after he has helped him to the bathroom!”2 Bernard Carr, who was one of Hawking’s earliest students to have this honor and is now at the University of London, describes his time there as “like participating in history.”3 The duties of the lodgers were manifold. To earn their keep they were expected to play, as required, the roles of nanny, secretary, and handyman, helping with travel arrangements, babysitting the children, drawing up lecture schedules, and managing general household repairs.
Another early lodger was the American physicist Don Page. After finishing his Ph.D. at Caltech, Page had written to Hawking asking for a job reference. In the months that followed, several research groups wrote to Hawking about Page, and each time he gave a favorable reference. Then, some time later, he wrote to the young physicist, “I’ve been writing letters of reference for you, but I may have a position myself.”4 Hawking managed to help Page secure funding for a year and then organized a grant for a further two years of research. Page joined the Hawking household in 1976 and reestablished the close friendship they had enjoyed in California.
One of Page’s duties was to commute with Hawking each day between West Road and the DAMTP. This was seen as a good time to talk, to summarize the previous day’s efforts, and to consider the tasks for the day ahead. It was a very productive time, even though Page found Hawking’s way of working through complex mathematics in his head quite hard to get used to. Talking about the twice-daily journey, he has said:
I found it very good training. During the three years I was a postdoc, I lived with the Hawking family, and a lot of times I’d walk back and forth with him. Of course I couldn’t write while I was walking, and sometimes he would ask me something, and I’d try to think it out in my head. When you have to do it in your head, you have to get really to the heart of the matter and try to eliminate the inessential details.5
Around the time of the move to West Road, Hawking found that he could no longer use the three-wheel invalid car he had had on loan from the National Health Service since 1969 and in which he traveled to the Institute of Astronomy three times a week. At first this appeared to be another blow; but, as has often been the case with the Hawkings, they were able to turn the situation to their advantage. Jane says:
It was a blessing in disguise, because the roads are so dangerous out to the Institute anyhow. It didn’t matter because we could afford to buy the electric wheelchair . . . which he runs along in, and is really much more convenient for him because he doesn’t have to be sure of having people to help him in and out as he does with the car. So he’s completely independent in the electric wheelchair. There’s always some compensating factor that makes deterioration acceptable.6
Hawking became a real demon of a wheelchair driver. One journalist described his skills thus:
He hurtles out into the street. At full throttle the chair is capable of a decent trotting pace, and Hawking likes to use full throttle. He also knows no fear. He simply shoots out into the middle of the road on the assumption that any passing cars will stop. His assistants rush nervously out ahead of him to try to minimize the danger.7
Jane’s relief that he no longer had to use the three-wheeler on the roads of Cambridge could so easily have been misplaced. Indeed, in early 1991, Hawking was involved in an accident in his wheelchair. He is a very familiar figure in the city, and passersby stop and talk to him. However, on this occasion a driver failed to see the chair with the slumped figure of the world’s most famous living scientist at the controls. The car hit the chair, and Hawking’s frail body was thrown onto the road. It could have been a disastrous accident, but fortunately he suffered only minor injuries, cutting his face and damaging a shoulder. It is typical of the man that, against medical advice, he was back in his office within forty-eight hours and demanding that his papers and books be propped up in front of him so that he could work.
On other occasions, his “boy-racer” antics have caused great embarrassment. In June 1989, Hawking was to deliver the prestigious Halley Lecture at Oxford University. A young, newly appointed physics professor, George Efstathiou, was given the unenviable task of looking after the eminent visiting lecturer before, during, and after the talk. Hawking arrived at the Department of Zoolo
gy, where the university’s largest lecture theater is housed, and was escorted into reception. It was Efstathiou’s job to get his famous charge to the theater, one floor below, where the vice-chancellor of the university and six hundred students, city dignitaries, and interested laypeople were waiting in expectation.
A two-man elevator at the end of the reception area would take them to the floor below and lead, via a short corridor, to the lecture theater. The elevator doors were open. Before Efstathiou had a chance of helping Hawking into the elevator, Hawking set the chair to full throttle and headed for the open doors a dozen yards ahead of him.
Efstathiou remembers clearly that he estimated, even from that distance, that Hawking could not make it into the narrow elevator entrance, and he could do nothing but watch in horror as his guest speaker hurtled toward the aperture. At last propelled into action, Efstathiou gave chase but could not catch up. To his amazement, Hawking made it through the elevator doors.
But that was only the beginning of Efstathiou’s troubles. For as Hawking had entered the elevator, the chair had twisted at an angle and jammed in the narrow space. The elevator doors closed automatically behind the chair, trapping its wheels between them. Efstathiou was panic-stricken. Downstairs, hundreds of people were waiting for Hawking, who was already late. The disabled scientist could not reach any of the control buttons, but the doors had closed on him. What was to be done?
Meanwhile, seemingly unperturbed by events, Hawking was busily punching instructions into his computer to get it to put the chair into reverse. If Efstathiou could have seen his face, he would undoubtedly have encountered the famous, mischievous Hawking smile. Finally, Efstathiou succeeded in squeezing his arm into the crack between the doors and just managed to reach the door-opening button. Freed, Hawking sent the chair into high-speed reverse and reemerged unscathed and grinning. As Efstathiou says, “That experience was quite an initiation into college administration!”
