by John Gribbin
At the time, Hawking used his wheelchair as an appendage to his paralyzed body, a device for the physical expression of his personality. (Nowadays, he unfortunately cannot control the wheelchair by himself.) He cannot shout and scream at people. Of course, his computer-generated voice is totally expressionless, but he could certainly move his wheelchair around. Hawking has, as one journalist put it, “a strain of fierceness running through [his] personality, surfacing in spates of impatience or anger.”8 If he felt that someone was wasting his time, he would simply spin his wheelchair on the spot and speed out of the room in a huff.
John Boslough recalls an incident when he got on the wrong side of Hawking and received the usual rebuff. While talking to him, he had become so oblivious to the other’s condition that he began talking about a problem he was having with his elbow as a result of a squash match in London the day before. “Hawking made no comment. He simply steered his wheelchair out of the room and waited in the hall for me to return to the subject at hand—theoretical physics.”9 Perhaps talking to a paralyzed man about squash was not the most subtle of things to do, but the incident illustrates the very well-known fact that Hawking is certainly not a man to cross lightly.
His favorite move, when he was annoyed by something someone had said, was to drive over their toes. By all accounts, a number of his students and colleagues had to develop pretty fast reflexes. One of Hawking’s former students, Nick Warner, claimed, “His great regret is that he’s not yet run over Margaret Thatcher!”10 He never got the chance.
There is, of course, a very different side to his personality: Hawking the family man. He loved nothing more than using his wheelchair skills when playing with his children and applied his usual recklessness when racing around the garden of West Road playing tag. The sad fact is that he can play no other physical games with them. It was Jane who taught them cricket and played Stephen’s old game of croquet on warm summer evenings with Robert, Lucy, and, later, Timothy. As one journalist wrote,
In many ways, she has had to be both mother and father to her children. Even the hours she spent as a schoolgirl on the cricket pitch of St. Albans High School, alternately bored to tears and terrified of the ball, were to have their value. “I have been the one who has to teach my two boys to play cricket—and I can get them out!” she has said.11
As their first two children were growing up, Hawking was receiving greater and greater accolades as a scientist. In the space of just two years, 1975 and 1976, he won six major awards. First was the Eddington Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in London, given the year he returned from California. This was followed shortly by the Pius XI Medal, bestowed by the Pontifical Academy of Science at the Vatican. In 1976 came the Hopkins Prize, the Dannie Heinemann Prize from the United States, the Maxwell Prize, and the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal—the citation for which noted “his remarkable results in his work on black holes.” As the international physics community began to recognize his talents, his own university was increasingly acknowledging Hawking’s worth. During the move from Little St. Mary’s Lane to West Road, he was made reader in gravitational physics at the DAMTP, an academic position somewhere between a fellow and a professor.
As the awards and prizes mounted up, Jane was becoming increasingly disillusioned with their life and her role in it. It was a time of great change in the way the West perceived women and their position in society. The sixties, for all their sexual liberation and permissiveness, saw very little real change in the role played by women or the way in which they were treated by the other half of the population. What sexual permissiveness and “liberation” really meant was a different system by which the average woman could be exploited, the whole thing wrapped in a sugarcoating of freely available contraception and shifted morality.
In the seventies, women gained a little more self-respect. This was in part backed up by changes in the law and the support of the media. Some of these events undoubtedly altered Jane’s perception of her role. She was happy to play nurse, support her husband through his glittering career, and raise a family almost single-handedly. But she had a growing feeling that she was being ignored as a human being, as an intelligent woman who was academically successful in her own right. She was beginning to feel like nothing more than a sidekick to the great Stephen Hawking. As she has put it:
Cambridge is a jolly difficult place to live if your only identity is as the mother of small children. The pressure is on you to make your own way academically.12
Cambridge looks like a quaint little English town, but there is a certain degree of bitchiness within its refined academic elite. Although the university community has always been quick to reinforce the image of Jane Hawking as a caring and devoted mother and wife, an element of professional jealousy does undoubtedly creep in. The claws are only sheathed by a thin veneer of civilization, and while her husband was collecting prize after prize, Jane was sliding into a state of declining self-respect:
I felt very hurt. I saw myself single-handedly making everything possible for Stephen and bringing up the two children at the same time. And the honors were all going to Stephen.13
She decided to do something about it and embarked on a Ph.D. course in medieval languages, specializing in Spanish and Portuguese poetry. She has said on reflection:
It was not a very happy experience. When I was working I thought I should be playing with the children, and when I was playing with the children I thought I should be working.14
Jane survived the course and went on to become a schoolteacher in Cambridge. But the feeling, as she puts it, of being “an appendage” has never left her entirely:
I’m not an appendage, though Stephen knows I very much feel I am when we go to some of these official gatherings. Sometimes I’m not even introduced to people. I come along behind and I don’t really know who I’m speaking to.15
To be fair to Stephen Hawking, according to his friends and colleagues he has never failed to bolster Jane’s contribution to his success and well-being. He takes every opportunity to speak of the great efforts and sacrifices she has made in order to allow them to live as normal a life as possible. One of his great regrets is that he was unable to play a greater role in helping to raise the children, and he would have loved to be able to play more than chess and wheelchair tag with them.
Naturally, Hawking’s condition has freed him from many duties other than helping to run the home. His various positions at the university have all come with reduced teaching and administration loads, and he has been allowed to spend a far greater proportion of his time thinking than the average professor can ever manage. Some have attributed his great successes in cosmology to this enhanced cerebral freedom, yet others have claimed that the turning point in the application of his abilities was the onset of his condition and that before then he was no more than an averagely bright student. Whatever the reason for his great insight and astonishing grasp of his subject, it may be true to say that he would not have progressed so quickly or soared to such heights if he had been expected to spend vast amounts of time organizing committees, attending faculty meetings, and overseeing undergraduate applications.
Feelings of growing resentment over their respective roles within the partnership were not the only difficulties slowly growing into problems for the couple during the seventies. There was the question of religion. Jane was raised as a Christian and has very strong religious views. To one interviewer she has said:
Without my faith in God, I wouldn’t have been able to live in this situation. I wouldn’t have been able to marry Stephen in the first place, because I wouldn’t have had the optimism to carry me through, and I wouldn’t be able to carry on with it.16
Hawking, for his part, is not an atheist; he simply finds the idea of faith something he cannot absorb into his view of the Universe. His outlook is not unlike that of Einstein, and he has been quoted as saying:
We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer
suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.17
It is clear from these two statements alone that the couple has had very different views almost from the moment they met. Jane attributes Hawking’s religious views partly to his physical condition:
As one grows older it’s easier to take a broader view. I think the whole picture for him is so different from the whole picture for anybody else by virtue of his condition and his circumstances—being an almost totally paralyzed genius—that nobody else can understand what his view of God is or what his relationship with God might be.18
But is this really the case? There have been many philosophers and scientists throughout history who would have made very similar statements to Hawking’s, but they did not suffer from ALS. Equally, of course, there is a number of practicing scientists who have very strong Christian convictions, and some have claimed that Hawking is simply not qualified to make statements about religion because he knows nothing about it. But what qualifications does one need? Hawking works in a field that does impinge on religion. His work deals with the origins and early life of the Universe. Could a subject be any more religious? He once stated:
It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the Universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the Universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws. But in that case one would just have to go by personal belief.19
And that has never been Hawking’s way.
When asked if there is any conflict between religion and science, Hawking tends to fall back on the same argument about personal belief and sees no real conflict. “If one took that attitude,” he replied, when asked whether he believed that science and religion were competing philosophies, “then Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity.”20 And what, in the light of Stephen’s and Jane’s dilemma, do we make of the famous last paragraph of A Brief History of Time?
However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the Universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.21
Science, it seems, may one day answer the question “how?” but not “why?”
Despite such statements, what really began to cause problems for Jane was a growing feeling that her husband was trying to eradicate any necessity for God in his view of the Universe. And as his fame and influence grew, she saw this as an escalating problem. It is doubtful that she believed he was fighting any kind of antireligious crusade with his work or that he was deliberately trying to prove the faithful wrong. It simply seemed to her that, in his Universe, pure mathematical reasoning overrode any need for God:
There’s one aspect of his thought that I find increasingly upsetting and difficult to live with. It’s the feeling that, because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth. He is delving into realms that really do matter to thinking people and in a way that can have a very disturbing effect on people—and he’s not competent.22
But who is? If nothing else, religion is a very personal matter. Are the leaders of the various churches any more knowledgeable about the origins and meaning of life than a scientist? Why should Stephen Hawking be any less competent to talk about God than the next person—or the next pontiff, come to that? Were the men of God right to sentence Galileo to end his years in solitary misery? Were they right to burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for daring to propose a contrary view of the Universe? Have all the religious wars of human history, with their accompanying terror and misery, been justifiable? Has organized religion been competent in those circumstances?
Jane is not scientifically trained and cannot share her husband’s insight into the subject, which he can articulate only with his professional colleagues. She has said:
One of my greatest regrets is that, not being a mathematician, I can understand Stephen’s work only in picture terms. He has to keep everything down to earth to explain it to me. It’s a good discipline for him.23
This had never been a problem before, but when Jane began to see that Hawking was approaching territory whose philosophical foundations were very close to her personal beliefs, it must have set alarm bells ringing.
What she objects to most strongly is Hawking’s “no-boundary” model of the Universe, which suggests that the Universe is self-contained. It is a model with which Hawking is particularly pleased. He has said of the idea, “It really underlies science because it is really the statement that the laws of science hold everywhere.”24 When addressing the problem of whether, if the Universe is self-contained, we need to explain how it got there in the first place, his answer is that we do not—“It would just BE.”25
Hawking has at least one close colleague with strong religious convictions, his friend and collaborator Don Page. In fact, Page is a born-again Christian, an evangelist as well as a cosmologist. He seems to find no difficulty in marrying the two extreme aspects of his life and work. He says of the no-boundary model:
[In] the Judaeo-Christian view, God creates and sustains the entire Universe rather than just the beginning. Whether or not the Universe has a beginning has no relevance to the question of its creation, just as whether an artist’s line has a beginning and an end, or instead forms a circle with no end, has no relevance to the question of its being drawn.26
Jane once told a reporter that she had been saddened when, soon after he had taken up residence in their home, Page tried to engage Hawking in a religious discussion but was forced to give up. Despite their vastly differing outlooks, the two men have remained friends, simply agreeing not to discuss any form of personal God.
Hawking confounds both his critics and supporters with seemingly ambiguous statements, such as:
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a Universe for them to describe?27
Surely Hawking is not here suggesting that there may be a role for a Creator after all. On this matter he seems to take pleasure in leaving things open-ended. By simply limiting the need for a God, he has held back from denying God’s existence altogether:
Einstein once asked the question, “How much choice did God have in constructing the Universe?” If the no-boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the Universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number of complete unified theories . . . that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the Universe and ask about the nature of God.28
Thinkers on both sides of the divide—those who support conventional religious views as well as the cynics and atheists—have quoted and misquoted Hawking on so many occasions that one writer recently compared his eloquence and quotability to that of Shakespeare or the Bible. Hawking scoffs at such suggestions, restating the fact that his quotability is derived from his succinctness, a talent he has had to nurture because of the difficulty he has communicating.
Hawking seems to have done little to help Jane through this crisis. She was, and perhaps still is, left exasperated by his stubbornness on the issue. “I pronounce my view that there are different ways of approaching it [religion], and the mathematical way is only one way,” Jane has said, “and he just smiles.”29
It is not only conventional religion for which Hawking feels extreme skepticism. The lessons he learned from the ES
P experiments in the fifties have never left him, and he has no time for mysticism or metaphysics in any shape or form. A number of writers have made attempts to bridge the gap between mysticism and late-twentieth-century physics. There are many who see parallels between Eastern religion and quantum mechanics, ancient teachings, and chaos theories, but Hawking pooh-poohs the whole scene. In his book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye describes an occasion when he met Hawking in the seventies and managed to steer him onto the topic of mysticism without getting his toes crushed. Overbye quoted the anthropologist Joseph Campbell on the Hindu goddess Kali, “the terrible one of many names whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled, whose womb is giving birth forever to all things.” He then tried to draw a connection between Kali and black holes. Barely able to contain himself, Hawking snorted:
It’s fashionable rubbish. People go overboard on Eastern mysticism simply because it’s something different that they haven’t met before. But, as a natural description of reality, it fails abysmally to produce results. . . . If you look through Eastern mysticism you can find things that look suggestive of modern physics or cosmology. I don’t think they have any significance.
Calling these things black holes was a master-stroke by Wheeler because it does make a [psychological] connection, or conjure up a lot of human neuroses. If the Russian term “frozen star” had been generally adopted, then this part of Eastern mythology would not at all seem significant. They’re named black holes because they relate to human fears of being destroyed or gobbled up. So in that sense there is a connection. I don’t have fears of being thrown into them. I understand them. I feel in a sense that I’m their master.30
However, a number of journalists and commentators on the periphery of Hawking’s world have made some quite ridiculous extrapolations on this theme. To some, Hawking is a metaphor for his own work, a black-hole astronaut himself. When Overbye put this to him, he was understandably ruffled by the suggestion.
