Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

Some years earlier, Hawking had entered into a protracted fight with the university authorities over improved access for him in the DAMTP building. The row was about who was to pay for a ramp to be installed. Hawking eventually won and also managed to persuade the authorities to lower the curbs in the vicinity of Silver Street to ease his journey from West Road. Such clashes put Hawking in a fighting mood about the needs of the disabled, and he has been crusading for various causes ever since.

  He took on the Cambridge City Council over access to public buildings and won. After a long drawn-out argument and an exchange of increasingly abrasive letters, curbs were lowered in a number of vital places and ramps installed in various buildings. One particular dispute concerned a public building named Cockcroft Hall, used as a polling station during local elections. After polling day, Hawking complained to the council that it was practically impossible for the severely disabled to enter the building in order to vote. The council authorities tried to argue that Cockcroft Hall was not actually a public building and did not therefore come under the Disabled Persons Act of 1970. Because of Professor Hawking’s involvement, the local press became interested in the issue and subsequently ran a series of articles highlighting the problems faced by the disabled in Cambridge. The city council backed down.

  Toward the end of 1979, the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation nominated Hawking for “Man of the Year,” and his efforts in fighting for the rights of handicapped people were again noted by the local press, which held him up as a champion of their cause. Hawking himself has ambivalent feelings on this issue. On the one hand, he wants to do what he can for other handicapped people, for, being disabled himself, he knows and fully understands the problems faced by the handicapped. He has a stubborn streak and definite strains of a rebellious nature, partly cultivated by his circumstances, which give him an appetite for dispute. He loves nothing more than a good argument, whether it is about cosmology, socialism, or the rights of the disabled. On the other hand, Hawking has always made a conscious effort to detach himself from his condition. He has absolutely no interest in learning more about his illness or overemphasizing his disability.

  One interviewer asked him if he regretted not using his intellectual powers to help find a cure for his illness. He replied that he would have found that too upsetting. He is a physicist, not a medical man, and knowing the gruesome details would, he feels, be totally unproductive. Hawking is, of course, very happy that others are working on a cure for ALS, but he does not wish to know how the research is going. He just wants to be told when they have made a breakthrough.

  All this led to what was perceived at the time to be a strangely ambivalent attitude to the problems faced by the disabled. Critics began to complain that he was not doing enough, that his growing celebrity was a perfect platform for him to be heard above the crowd. As time has gone on, Hawking has indeed become more active, but the simple fact is that he hardly needs do anything because, just by staying alive and continuing to work at the intense rate he and the world have grown used to, he is an inspiration to handicapped people everywhere.

  In a recent speech at an occupational science conference at the University of Southern California, he certainly made every effort to raise his voice above the crowd:

  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. Aids like wheelchairs and computers can play an important role in overcoming physical deficiencies; the right 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.10

  Having acquired a taste for it, Hawking did not restrict his campaigning to the problems of the disabled. He was beginning to show a growing interest in saying his piece about a number of wide-ranging socio-political issues. He led a campaign to change the ruling prohibiting the admission of female students into Caius College, a row that lasted the best part of a decade. He and Jane continued to be paid-up members of the Labor Party, and he was becoming increasingly vocal on social issues such as the plight of the poor and the state of the environment. He has joked that he is a “right-wing socialist,” but his attitudes toward concerns ranging from the Falklands War to nuclear disarmament show definite leanings toward a brand of liberalism prevalent in the Hawking household of his early years.

  When accepting an award sponsored by a U.S. defense contractor, he lectured the executives of the company gathered at the ceremony on the senselessness of nuclear weapons:

  We have the equivalent of four tons of high explosives for every person on earth. It takes half a pound of explosive to kill one person, so we have 16,000 times as much as we need. We must understand that we are not in conflict with the Soviets, that both sides have a strong interest in the stability of the other side. We ought to recognize that fact and cooperate, rather than arm ourselves against each other.11

  Apart from getting his own office, life at the DAMTP had changed little upon his appointment as Lucasian Professor. Silver Street is a narrow winding lane off King’s Parade in the center of Cambridge. The sign for the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics is unobtrusive to the point of near uselessness—visitors frequently find themselves unable to find the entrance unassisted. When finally discovered, the sign indicates an archway leading on to a cobbled courtyard. A number of cars are parked around the perimeter and there are stacks of bicycles, three deep, propped up against the stonework. At the far end of the courtyard is a red door with a glass window and, on a wall to one side, there is a brass plate announcing the department in a clearer and more elegant fashion.

  Inside, a linoleum-floored hallway leads to a large, scruffy common room. Tables and low, soft chairs are randomly distributed around the room, left where positioned by their most recent occupants. The walls are painted gray, and the whole atmosphere is one of academic drabness, slightly neglected, workaday. From the common room, doors lead off to a number of offices. The one Hawking shared with a former student, Gary Gibbons, sports a sticker that says “Black Holes Are Out of Sight.” The door to his new office has a typically self-mocking addition pasted at head height: QUIET, PLEASE, THE BOSS IS ASLEEP.

  At that time, Hawking’s office had changed little since he took it over in 1979. It was relatively small and dominated by a desk set two thirds of the way back from the door. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and to one side of the desk sat a set of gadgets. The first was a telephone specially adapted with a microphone and loudspeaker so that he could use it without having to hold the handset. Next to that was another device—a page turner that automatically leafed through any book placed on a raised platform, operated at the touch of a button. Once an assistant had positioned a book for him and set the fasteners, Hawking could find any place in the text he wished to read. Complications arose if he wanted to consult a paper or read a magazine, because the machine could not handle them. On these occasions, the article had to be xeroxed and laid out on the desk for him. On the desk, next to framed pictures of the family, was a computer, augmented by the addition of two levers that operated a cursor on the screen. This replaced the normal keyboard and doubled as a “blackboard” and word processor.

  There is a relaxed atmosphere in the department. Perpetuating the tradition of several decades, everyone meets twice daily for morning coffee and afternoon tea. At these gatherings the talk centers on the day’s work. Spending five minutes in the DAMTP’s common room reveals an obvious fact: physicists love to talk shop. The students treat Hawking with playful irreverence; there is no standing on ceremony or elitism here. When the writer Dennis Overbye visited Hawking at the DAMTP, he came across a group of students huddled around a Formica-topped table in the common room. “In age, dress, pallor and evidence of nutritional deficiency, they re
sembled the road-crew of a rock-and-roll band”12 is how he described them. Hawking mucks in with them, cracking corny undergraduate jokes. Following an old tradition, if they hit on a bright idea during the course of their discussions they write out mathematical descriptions on the tabletops. “When we want to save something we just xerox the table,”13 Hawking told Overbye.

  Hawking’s administrative duties extended to running the small relativity group, which consisted of a dozen or so research assistants of wide-ranging nationality and the supervision of a handful of Ph.D. students. Apart from these responsibilities, the professorship allowed him to carry on with what he had previously devoted so much time to—thinking.

  At home, Hawking’s schedule was a hectic one. Hardly a week would go by without a visit from a foreign colleague. It was now his responsibility to organize symposia and lectures given by physicists interested in visiting Cambridge. Hawking’s relativity group at the DAMTP was seen as being at the cutting edge of research, and there was no shortage of scientists interested in sharing their latest work with the Cambridge team.

  Hawking had, by this time, established an exhausting work routine at the DAMTP, one that has changed little to this day. He rose early, but it could take up to two hours for him to get ready to leave the house, arriving at his office by 10 A.M. The journey from West Road took no more than ten minutes and was usually spent in conversation with one of his Ph.D. students or research assistants. After checking the mail with his secretary, he usually spent the morning working at his computer or reading articles or papers written by others in the field. At 11 A.M. sharp, he would wheel himself off to the common room where an assistant helped him with drinking his coffee, lifting the cup to Hawking’s mouth. He then often spent some time conversing, as best he could, with the students and research assistants, before returning to his office until lunchtime to make and receive telephone calls and answer correspondence.

  At 1 P.M. precisely, he would set off for lunch at Caius College. Usually accompanied by an assistant, he would set the control toggle of the wheelchair to full throttle and head off toward King’s Parade, passing by King’s College Chapel and the Senate House, his assistant having to break into a trot to keep up. Hawking loves this city in which he has spent most of his life. The grandeur of its architecture and the atmosphere of intense intellectual activity pervading the place are very important to him. Accompanied on this journey by one writer, he gave the interviewer a history lesson, tinged with his characteristic brand of irony:

  When Dr. Caius reopened Gonville College in the sixteenth century, he built three gates. You entered through the Gate of Humility, you passed through the Gate of Wisdom and Virtue, and you left through the Gate of Honour. The Gate of Humility has been torn down. It’s not needed any more.14

  After lunch each weekday, Hawking headed off back to the DAMTP to work until teatime. At 4 P.M., the usually silent common room would erupt with the noise of those who work there. Tea was drunk as a number of animated conversations took place in small groups. Then, as now, Hawking usually sat in one corner of the room. He rarely says more than a few sentences during the course of tea, but when he does speak, people listen. One student has remarked that more can be gained from a few of Hawking’s crisp, precise statements than from a whole lecture by anyone else.

  His students usually came to see him in the late afternoon. They would sit beside him at his desk or perch alongside the desktop computer screen. With the sheets of equations they had been working on spread before them, Hawking would survey their efforts and make a few clipped suggestions. His close associates, his research assistants, then fleshed out his comments and helped the Ph.D. students unravel problems and expand on the professor’s suggestions.

  After tea, Hawking usually worked until 7 P.M. He would then wheel his chair out of the building and rerun the morning’s journey in reverse. Some evenings he chose to dine with the other dons and professors at high table in college. On such occasions he would be obliged to dress in his professorial gown. At other times he stayed at home with Jane and the children, or the couple would go out to eat at a Cambridge restaurant while one of Hawking’s helpers babysat.

  As his celebrity grew, the amount of time Hawking spent traveling abroad increased further. During the early 1980s, he made several trips to America each year and attended numerous conferences and lectures in Europe and other parts of the globe. Roger Penrose has recalled that nothing would stop Stephen making trips to far-flung destinations and that he would try to attend every important conference, no matter where it was held. At one conference held in Belgium, he almost missed the plane home from Brussels because the cab driver taking him and Penrose to the airport got lost. Arriving at the airport, with the plane on the tarmac ready to leave, Penrose had to race along ramps and through airport buildings with Hawking’s wheelchair whirring along at full throttle beside him. They just made it in time, boarding the aircraft minutes before takeoff.

  Jane began to travel abroad less frequently so that she could look after the growing family in Cambridge. The responsibility of nursing Hawking on foreign visits increasingly fell to his research assistants and close colleagues. Friends like Penrose would help out as best they could and travel with him when they were attending the same conference, but by this time one of his students would always have to go with him everywhere he went. Whenever possible, Hawking tried to stretch the budget in order to finance a nurse to accompany him and his academic assistant. In this respect, things were easier after he became Lucasian Professor; but even so, academic institutions do not like to splash money around. By this time, however, Hawking had become sufficiently important, and his case exceptional enough, for rules to be bent somewhat.

  If they did not travel with him to destinations all over the world, the family was certainly never forgotten. Penrose remembers one incident when their return flight was delayed and they had to spend several hours in an airport lounge. Hawking had spotted a cuddly toy in the display window of one of the shops. He told his friend that he wanted that particular toy to take home for Lucy. Commandeering Penrose to buy it for him, Hawking spent the rest of their wait with a large, pink fluffy animal perched on his lap, practically swamping his wasted body. Lucy was of course delighted with the gift.

  When Hawking attended the groundbreaking cosmology conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican in 1981 (see Chapter 11), Jane went with him. The conference delegates and their partners spent a week in Rome. On a number of evenings, Stephen and Jane went out to restaurants, often sharing their table with Dennis Sciama and his wife, Lydia, as well as other friends who were also attending the conference. Jane remembers the trip as a happy time for the two of them. Between meetings and discussions, Stephen tried to make time for sightseeing, one of his favorite pastimes.

  In his address to the conference, the Pope warned the physicists against delving too deeply into the question of how or why the Universe began, reminding them that this was solely a matter for theologians. He went on:

  Any scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as that of the primeval atom from which the whole of the physical world derived, leaves open the problem concerning the beginning of the Universe. Science cannot by itself resolve such a question; what is needed is that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics which is called metaphysics; it needs above all the knowledge that comes from the revelation of God.15

  Hawking sat impassively in his wheelchair, listening as Pope John Paul II told them that he saw nothing wrong with modern cosmology and even believed that there may be some substance to the idea of the Big Bang. But that, he said, was where the line of demarcation should be drawn, and cosmologists should not try to look beyond it. Some of the older scientists in attendance were reminded of another conference held at the Vatican in 1962, when Pope John XXIII declared that he hoped they would all follow the example of Galileo! It was at the 1981 Vatican Conference that Hawking announced his controversial “
no-boundary” theorem and the religious connotations accompanying it. It was received enthusiastically by the audience, but what the Pope thought of the idea has not been reported. If nothing else, Hawking certainly has a highly developed sense of occasion.

  After the conference, the visiting physicists and their spouses were invited to an audience with the Pope at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. The building itself is unimposing but possesses a simple beauty. Visitors pass through the little village surrounding the grounds and up to the house via a long driveway. The scientists from the Vatican were not the only guests of the Pope that afternoon, and security at Castel Gandolfo (and indeed in Vatican City) was as tight as could be expected. That year, 1981, will surely be remembered as the year of assassination attempts.

  Six months earlier, ex-Beatle John Lennon had arrived at the Dakota Apartments in New York, where he lived with his wife, Yoko Ono. Moments later, he was senselessly gunned down by a psychopath, Mark Chapman, and millions of fans the world over were shaken at what they saw as the end of an era. In March 1981, the recently inaugurated President Ronald Reagan had been hit in the chest by a .22 bullet; and less than two months later, Pope John Paul II himself had nearly died when he was struck by four bullets from a 9-mm Browning, one of which lodged in his lower intestine. The audience at Castel Gandolfo was the Pope’s first public appearance since the incident in St. Peter’s Square that had almost taken his life.

  Following a private meeting with the physicists, the Pope gave a speech in the main reception room, after which his guests were introduced to him in person as he sat on a raised chair upon a dais guarded by Papal security. The visitors entered from one side of the platform, knelt before the Pontiff, exchanged a few muttered words, and then left on the far side of the stage. When it was Hawking’s turn, he wheeled onto the stage and up to the Pope. The other guests watched as the man who, only days earlier, had talked of the “no-boundary” concept and the fact that there could be no need for a Creator came face to face with the leader of the Catholic Church and, for millions, God’s representative on Earth. Everyone, believer and cynic alike, was curious to know what would be said. However, no one in the room could have been more surprised by what happened next. As Hawking’s wheelchair came to a halt in front of the Pope, John Paul left his seat and knelt down to bring his face to Hawking’s level.