Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  Maybe the end is in sight for theoretical physicists, if not for theoretical physics.

  16

  FAME AND FORTUNE

  From conception to best-seller list, A Brief History of Time took over five years. During the same period, Hawking had continued his research and administration of the DAMTP. In 1984, long before the first draft of Brief History had been completed, Hawking went on a lecture tour of China. The itinerary for the trip would have been strenuous for an able-bodied man, but he insisted on cramming in as much as possible during the visit. He motored along the Great Wall in his wheelchair, saw the sights of Peking, and gave talks to packed auditoriums in several cities. Dennis Sciama said that he believed the trip took a lot out of Hawking and has even suggested that it helped precipitate his subsequent illness in Switzerland less than a year later.

  However, there were other exertions along the way. In the early summer of 1985, Hawking undertook a lecture tour of the world. One of the most important stopovers was at Fermilab, in Chicago. At the core of the cosmology group at Fermilab were three larger-than-life characters, Mike Turner, David Schramm, and Edward Kolb, who have perhaps contributed as much to legend and anecdote surrounding the global cosmology fraternity as they have hard science.

  Mike Turner is a tall handsome Californian with a voice indistinguishable from Harrison Ford’s. His office at Fermilab, where he spends most of his working life, is filled with toys and gadgets. Hanging from the ceiling are inflatable airliners and UFOs. The walls are plastered with postcards from friends around the world, humorous messages, and wacky pictures, the floor littered with books and boxes of scientific papers. One wall is taken up by a blackboard covered in the hieroglyphs of physics; another opens onto a view of the lakes and woods surrounding the massive concrete columns of the central building which splay at the bottom and converge at the top to form an inverted V.

  Edward Kolb, known as “Rocky” because of his penchant for fighting, is a cosmologist from Los Alamos who joined the cosmology group at the same time as Turner in the early eighties. He and Turner became great friends and gained a reputation as a comic duo at Fermilab, forever playing practical jokes and initiating mischief. Their lectures were invariably witty, entertaining occasions, Turner’s often featuring brightly colored cartoons of Darth Vader to illustrate his ideas.

  The cosmology group was set up by David Schramm, who was chairman of the astronomy department of the University of Chicago, a close friend of Hawking, and a formidable personality on the international cosmology scene.

  Hawking arrived at Fermilab to give a technical lecture to a large group of physicists from around the globe and promptly discovered that there was neither elevator nor ramp to enable him to reach the lecture theater in the basement. Turner recalls how he and Kolb were escorting Hawking into the building when the horrifying thought suddenly struck them: how were they to get Stephen to the stage? They looked at each other and, without saying a word, Turner lifted Hawking’s featherweight body into his arms and Kolb grabbed the wheelchair. Halfway down the aisle of the lecture theater, Turner became aware that the entire audience was watching agog as they struggled to the stage, and suddenly remembered how Hawking hated to have attention drawn to his disabilities. In the event, Stephen said nothing about the incident, realizing, he mentioned later, that there was absolutely no alternative.

  Next day he gave a public lecture in Chicago, receiving a rock star’s reception. The standing-room-only audience packed the auditorium, and a number of people had to be turned away. He was recognized everywhere he went, and people stopped him on the street to express their interest in what he was doing. The title of his lecture was “The Direction of Time.” To a startled audience he declared that, at some point in the far distant future, the Universe would begin to contract back to a singularity and that during this collapse time would reverse—everything that had ever happened during the expansion phase would be reenacted but backward.

  There were many who opposed Hawking’s ideas, including his close friend Don Page. Indeed, Hawking himself knew that he was venturing into wild country. After the visit the two of them wrote opposing papers, published in the same issue of the scientific journal Physical Review. Hawking’s paper led off the pair and concluded by saying that Page had some interesting arguments on the subject and that he might well be right. Eighteen months later, in December 1986, Hawking returned to Chicago to deliver a talk which announced that he had been wrong in 1985 and now proclaimed the opposing view to be correct: time would not go into reverse as the Universe contracted.

  By this time, Hawking and Guzzardi were tidying up the manuscript for A Brief History of Time, which Al Zuckerman was selling to foreign publishers, and Hawking himself had grown accustomed to his computer-generated voice synthesizer. A Cambridge computer engineer named David Mason had designed and built a portable version of the device operated by a minicomputer that could be attached to Hawking’s wheelchair. Now his voice could go with him everywhere he went. He began to deliver lectures with the new machine in 1986. Suddenly, audiences could fully understand what he was saying, and although the voice did not produce sentences with the Home Counties accent Hawking would have preferred, what he had to say was so much clearer now that he no longer needed to use an interpreter.

  Attending a Hawking lecture is, initially, a very odd experience. An assistant wheels him onto the stage, his voice synthesizer is plugged in to the public address system, and the computer disks containing the text of his talk are inserted into the computer perched on the arm of his wheelchair. To the audience, Hawking looks totally passive, immobile but for facial expression, the tiny, imperceptible movements of his fingers operating the computer. He lifts his eyebrows and smiles at appropriate points; his eyes glint in the stage lights as his head lolls onto his chest. Standing in the wings are two nurses and a small group of research students, always ready to come to his assistance if needed. After an introduction by the organizer, and when the applause dies down, a disembodied voice suddenly bursts into the room from the PA speakers: “In this lecture, I would like to discuss. . . .” The preprogrammed disks can hold a little under half an hour of his lecture, so that at a predesignated point in the talk he has to announce to the audience that he is reloading his computer and will continue in a few moments.

  After the talk he invites the audience to ask questions but warns that the responses will take some time for him to program into his computer. “During this time,” he says, “please talk among yourselves, read newspapers, relax.” The answers can take up to ten minutes to come back. A spokesman announces that Professor Hawking is now ready to reply, and the audience falls silent. There is no possibility of any interaction between the questioner and Hawking: the answer is accepted and the next person is already up and ready with another question. Sometimes Hawking’s answer is a simple “Yes” or “No,” a response that comes quickly. Sometimes, just for fun, he has been known to deliberately wait five minutes before responding with a monosyllabic reply. The audience loves it and bursts into spontaneous laughter. On more than one occasion he has been known to wait five minutes, only to ask for the questioner to repeat the question. As he has grown older, Hawking’s innate sense of mischief has not diminished in the slightest.

  In December 1990 he was invited to deliver a public lecture at a symposium held in Brighton. The venue was a huge complex of auditoriums called the Brighton Conference Center. Unfortunately for the delegates, the complex had to be shared with the rock group Status Quo performing in one of the main halls. Between five and seven o’clock, the intense concentration of audiences in various rooms and theaters around the building was broken by the band sound-checking in the Main Hall.

  Interspersed with talk of worm holes and neutron-star astrophysics came the thump, thump, thump of a bass drum and the yells of roadies bellowing down microphones, “One, two; one, two; testing, testing; one, two. . . .”

  On the evening before Hawking’s talk, he was expected at an
unofficial meeting in his hotel room at 8:30. At the appointed time, a small group of journalists and friends arrived, were let in, and sat down to wait for him. Twenty minutes later, Hawking’s mother Isobel walked in, looking surprised to find them there.

  “Where’s Stephen?” one of the journalists asked. “He was supposed to be here at 8:30.”

  “Stephen? He’s gone to see Status Quo,” Isobel replied.

  A group of Hawking’s students had wanted to see the band and had sent a representative to find out if there were any remaining tickets. Hearing that the concert had sold out months ago, the student had told the organizers that Stephen Hawking was next door and really wanted to see Status Quo. Within five minutes he was handed a few complimentary tickets. According to one of his students, Hawking thoroughly enjoyed himself and stayed for the whole concert.

  After the publication of A Brief History of Time, there was a subtle shift of atmosphere at the DAMTP in Cambridge. There were incessant requests for interviews from newspapers and magazines from around the world. On several occasions over the next two years, a television crew took over the building to make a documentary about the life of the man who had become the most famous scientist in the world. The same stories appeared over and over again in a variety of languages, all telling of his courage in overcoming a crippling disease to become a scientific giant as well as a media hero. Journalist after journalist visited the cluttered office in Silver Street to spend an inspiring hour with the public’s latest hero. Returning to their offices, they wrote about the drab paintwork at the DAMTP, the scruffy assistants, the ever-present nurses, and the Marilyn Monroe poster pinned to the back of Hawking’s office door.

  Despite the countless thousands of words written about him, very little new information about the man appeared in the pages of the world’s press. The details of ALS and the succession of awards and honors bestowed upon him were trotted out time and again, but Hawking was determined to maintain a degree of privacy amid the whirlpool of hype.

  In the United States, ABC profiled Hawking in its 20/20 series, while in Britain a new documentary appeared called Master of the Universe, which won a Royal Television Society award in 1990. In the film, Hawking was shown bowling along the streets of Cambridge and in one shot was seen entering the main entrance of King’s College. The autumn after the program was televised, the admissions officer at King’s was astonished to find a huge increase in the number of applications to study mathematics at the college. The television audience had obviously assumed that Professor Hawking taught and worked at King’s College. In fact, he simply used a route through the grounds of King’s as a convenient shortcut for his wheelchair on the way to the DAMTP. But King’s did not disabuse the bright young mathematicians suddenly eager for places at the college.

  Hawking enjoyed the adulation and celebrity. He continued to travel around the world. The invitations to give public lectures were becoming overwhelming, and he could have spent his whole time delivering them unless he carefully selected the ones he would attend and those he could not. In Japan he was received as an idol, getting the sort of reception usually reserved for heads of state or internationally famous rock stars. Hundreds queued to hear him speak in lecture theaters throughout the country.

  Back in Cambridge, the volume of mail Hawking received daily had long since become too much for him to handle personally. A research assistant and his secretary were given the responsibility of sifting through the piles of invitations, letters, documents, and professional correspondence. For some years he had been receiving “crank mail,” a drawback of the job and experienced by many other famous scientists throughout the world, especially physicists. However, by the late eighties Hawking was beginning to receive an inordinate quantity of bizarre letters spanning the entire spectrum of eccentricity. Correspondents ranged from amateur physicists in country villages proposing ridiculous solutions to cosmological questions, to religious extremists criticizing what they saw as the intrusion of science into sacred areas. Before long, a “cranks file” was set up at the DAMTP where the best examples of the genre were kept for entertainment value; the rest were put in the waste-paper bin.

  Meanwhile, academic accolades and public acknowledgments of his scientific work kept coming. As early as 1985, long before the publication of A Brief History of Time, his portrait, commissioned by the trustees of the gallery, was hung in the National Portrait Gallery in London. In the late eighties alone, he received five more honorary degrees and seven international awards. In 1988 he shared the Israeli Wolf Foundation Prize in physics with Roger Penrose for their work on black holes.

  In January he traveled to Israel to receive the prize and a cash award of $100,000 at a ceremony at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament in Jerusalem, attended by the Israeli president and other political and scientific figures from around the world. The award did not pass without controversy. Jewish legislators boycotted the event, claiming that Hawking’s theories went against a tenet of Judaism that neither time nor objects existed before God created the Universe. Despite the protests, Hawking himself was pleased with the award, and in a typically double-edged comment he told the press, “I am very pleased. It shows that British science is still good, despite the government cuts.”1

  In 1989 the Queen again honored him when he was included in the Honors List for the second time. This time he was made a Companion of Honor, one of the nation’s top honors, and attended a reception at Buckingham Palace the following summer to receive the award from the Queen. During the week when he officially became a Companion of Honor, he received a very rare accolade when Cambridge University made him an honorary doctor of science. Only in very special cases do academics receive honorary doctorates from their own universities. The award was presented by Prince Philip, chancellor of the university, at a special ceremony in Cambridge. Hundreds of people lined the streets and applauded as Hawking wheeled along King’s Parade in the procession of dignitaries, arriving at the Senate House to the accompaniment of the choirs of King’s and St. John’s Colleges and the Cambridge University Brass Ensemble.

  To complete an astonishing week, on the Saturday evening, as the sun set over the spires and towers of a Cambridge basking in the summer warmth, the strains of Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell, and Handel could be heard as the Cambridge Camerata performed a special concert in Hawking’s honor at the Senate House in the center of the city. That night there was not a dry eye in the house, according to the local newspaper covering the event. As a special favor, the orchestra played Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” one of Hawking’s favorite pieces. As the applause for the musicians died down, Stephen wheeled up to the stage, turned and thanked the audience through his voice synthesizer, receiving a standing ovation from his friends and family and members of the public there to honor the man who had achieved so much against all odds. According to one journalist:

  There were tears rolling down the cheeks of men and women as a tribute to his courage, as well as the exceptional brain that has continued to advance knowledge of time and space in spite of the ravages of a crippling disease.2

  Another journalist told him at a reception after the concert that A Brief History of Time had received more inquiries from readers of the “News” book page of his paper than any other book.

  With Hawking’s enhanced status as a world-famous scientist and writer, his campaigning for the rights of the disabled stepped up a gear. In 1989, a project was set up in Cambridge to create a special hostel for handicapped students at the university. It was called the Shaftesbury “Bridget’s” Appeal in memory of Bridget Spufford, the disabled daughter of a Cambridge history lecturer who had been unable to find a single university in the country equipped for her needs. Bridget Spufford had died in May 1989, and her mother, Margaret, had managed to solicit the help of Hawking, who had willingly agreed to be a patron of the charity.

  The Hawking name carried weight, and an appeal to raise £600,000 was launched in a blaze of local publicity. Hawking went on
record as declaring that the attitude of the university toward the handicapped was appalling, stating that they were flouting the law by ignoring an act of Parliament dating back to 1970, which made it illegal not to provide appropriate access to disabled persons. He spoke of his own situation and how the university had ignored his special needs throughout his undergraduate and postgraduate years, installing a ramp at the DAMTP only under duress and after a long battle when he achieved the status of reader. The situation was so bad in Cambridge, he revealed, that the National Bureau for Handicapped Students advised people with serious disabilities not to consider Cambridge because of inadequate accommodations.

  Hawking also helped to establish a dormitory for handicapped students at Bristol University, which upon completion was named Hawking House. On a filing cabinet in his office at the DAMTP stands an abstract sculpture presented to him for his help in getting the dormitory built.

  By 1989, royalties from A Brief History of Time had begun to flood in, and with global sales in the millions it was obvious that Hawking no longer needed the financial support of charities to enable him to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle, provide for the education of his children, and pay for his around-the-clock nursing. He gratefully acknowledged his enormous debt to the foundations that had saved his life. But as A Brief History of Time gradually became what seemed to be a permanent feature on the best-seller list, unexpected storm clouds of controversy began to gather over a particular passage in the book.

  In Chapter 8, “The Origin and Fate of the Universe,” Hawking refers to the events surrounding the formulation of the cosmological theory of inflation, which we described in Chapter 11. He picks up the story in 1981, on a visit to Moscow, where the Russian physicist Andrei Linde told him of his latest work on inflation. Linde had written a paper on the subject, but Hawking had pointed out a major flaw in the theory that subsequently took the Russian cosmologist several months to sort out before the rewritten version was ready for submission to a journal.