by John Gribbin
For Hawking, the experience must have been incredibly profound. During those eight 25-second free-fall sessions, he would have felt completely released from the shackles of disability, the limitations placed upon his body for most of his life. And if his facial expression caught on camera and seen by millions around the world is anything to go by, he clearly had a fabulous time. “It was amazing,” he declared after the trip was completed. “The zero-g part was wonderful and the higher-g part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!”10
The co-founder of Zero Gravity Corp., Peter Diamandis, said: “It was an incredible day. He didn’t want to come back.” And Lucy Hawking, who also accompanied her father on the trip, described it as “Fantastic. We were all aged about three after the end of it.”11
Aside from all the fun of this adventure, there were two serious aspects to it. The first was that Hawking wanted to show that such experiences were not just for the young or the physically able-bodied. As he put it: “I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit.”12 The other reason was to provide him with an opportunity to proselytize the need for the human race to look to a future in which space travel becomes everyday. “I think the human race does not have a future if it doesn’t go into space,” he told the BBC; “I therefore want to encourage public interest in space. A zero-gravity flight is the first step towards space travel.”13
The year 2009 proved to be another in which, for a variety of reasons, Stephen Hawking made worldwide headlines. In his role as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), he flew to the States in February for a three-month trip. A succession of important meetings with fellow physicists and an appearance before an audience of several thousand at Arizona State University were included in the itinerary. But almost as soon as he landed in America, he fell ill with a respiratory infection. For several weeks he soldiered on in his typically stoic way, but by early April his condition had worsened. He was flown back to England and immediately admitted to Addenbrookes Hospital, a place that during the past forty years had become something of a home away from home.
This illness turned out to be very serious indeed and perhaps the most life-threatening since 1985, when a tracheostomy saved his life. The Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) posted grim-sounding news updates on its website, and the newspapers of the world were updating their obituary notices ready for publication. But of course, once again, reports of Hawking’s imminent death were greatly exaggerated. By the summer, he was back in America and delivering a lecture titled “Why We Should Go Into Space” before a capacity audience of 4,500 at the convention center of CalTech.
That summer, Hawking received one of the most prestigious awards of his prize-laden life when he was given the Medal of Freedom in Washington. The annual award is granted to those who have made outstanding contributions to culture, science, sport, and the humanities. Invited to the White House to receive the award on August 11, he joined fifteen other recipients including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Billie Jean King, and actor Sidney Poitier. Before the gathering and the press, Barack Obama, at his first Medal of Freedom ceremony, said: “This is a chance for me and for the United States of America to say thank you to some of the finest citizens of this country and of all countries. Excellence is still possible in a moment when cynicism and doubt too often prevail.”14 Hawking was clearly flattered and honored by this award, declaring: “It is a great privilege to be awarded the medal. Especially by President Obama, whom I admire deeply.”15
Two months later, there was a quite different ceremonial occasion at which Hawking was the center of attention. After thirty years as the 17th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, he was obliged to resign from the position. His last day as Lucasian Professor, the position first created by Henry Lucas in 1663 and once held by Isaac Newton, was September 30. The reason for this rather dramatic event was rooted in the origins of the chair, which stipulated that the holder must retire at, or before, the age of sixty-seven.
Hawking took the opportunity to make a press announcement in which he made it very clear that he was not retiring. As his successor to the Lucasian Professorship, the eminent string theorist Michael Green, took up the position, Hawking was made Director of Research at Cambridge and was based at the Centre for Mathematical Studies.
“The first thing I would like to say is that I’m not retiring,” he declared. He then went on to comment: “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 40 years, and I am happy I have made a small contribution.” With typical levity and cheekiness, he concluded: “I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm. There’s nothing like the Eureka moment of discovering something no one knew before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.”16
On a more serious note, Hawking made some rather unsubtle hints that he might consider leaving Britain altogether because he believed that the government was putting funding for science into industrial applications out of proportion to the money diverted into basic research, an axe he had been grinding for some years. As far back as 1995, he had declared publicly: “To demand that research projects should all be industrially relevant is ridiculous. How many of the great discoveries of the past that laid the foundation for our modern technology were made through industrially motivated research? The answer is hardly any.”17
Although the sentiment is understandable and it is obvious why, as a theoretical physicist, Hawking should feel so strongly about this, it is not an entirely valid comment. Many discoveries in the past that “. . . have laid the foundations for our modern technology” have indeed come from investment in industrial-research projects. And if the definition is broadened only slightly to encompass the industrial-military complex, then actually the majority of advances we take for granted have come from industrial research: plastics, nuclear power, space travel, global communications networks, and the Internet, to name but a few.18
This aside, how serious was Hawking being when he implied that he might up sticks and leave Cambridge, where he had lived and worked for almost half a century? There were rumors that he might take up a permanent position in the sunshine of Pasadena as a senior member of the CalTech faculty, and there was also a suggestion that he might move to Canada and the Directorship of the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, an institution he had visited on many occasions and liked. But ultimately, these were nothing more than rumors. Hawking, although clearly passionate about the way science is funded in the UK, was really just using his fame and universal acclaim as a tool to make a point and to upset the government, of which he was certainly no fan.
If any further proof than his often-acerbic remarks about the British government were required, we need only ask the question: Why is Hawking not Sir Stephen Hawking, or even Lord Hawking? After all, his close contemporary and world-class Cambridge cosmologist Astronomer Royal Martin Rees was knighted in 1992 and made a life peer (with the title Baron Rees of Ludlow) in 2005. As we saw in Chapter 16, Hawking had accepted the invitation from the Queen to be made a Companion of Honour (but this is not an honor so politically controlled as a knighthood or other awards on the annual honor list), and the simple truth is that Hawking was indeed sounded out concerning his feelings about a knighthood in the early nineties. He made it clear then that he could not accept such a thing because of his anger over the way the government was funding science.
In the wake of the unprecedented success of A Brief History of Time, Hawking continued to write and have his books published. He worked alone on The Universe in a Nutshell, but he also collaborated. The Grand Design, published in September 2010, was coauthored with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow, and, even before it hit the shops, it had stirred up controversy (doubtless encouraged by the publicists behind the book) and was trending on Twitter as a book that “put
the boot in” to the very notion of God, offering, through physics (and in particular M-theory) rather than philosophy, the pseudo-Nietzschean premise that God was very much “dead.”
It helped sales, of course, and although it (in the company of everything else Hawking has had published since 1988) could not begin to approach the level of success of A Brief History of Time, it furthered the Hawking name, was serialized in The Times, and was for a short time the Number One Bestseller on Amazon, but the book was panned for a variety of reasons. There were those who simply loathe the very idea of a scientist venturing into territory they consider solely the preserve of theologians. A typical remark of this caliber came from the Bishop of Swindon, Dr. Lee Rayfield, who offered the BBC the old chestnut: “Science can never prove the non-existence of God just as it can never prove the existence of God. Faith is a matter that’s outside that.”19 However, it was not only the conventionally religious who felt offended by some of Hawking’s remarks in the book. No less a figure than Baroness Susan Greenfield, one of the world’s most eminent neurologists, former Head of the Royal Institution and Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, compared his remarks to the approach of the Taliban: “Science can often suffer from a certain smugness and complacency. Michael Faraday, one of the greatest scientists, had a wonderful quote. He said: ‘There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.’ What we need to preserve in science is a curiosity and an open-mindedness rather than a complacency and a sort of arrogance where we attack people who come at the big truths and the big questions, albeit using different strategies.” When asked if she felt uncomfortable about scientists making proclamations about God, she declared: “Yes, I am. Of course they can make whatever comments they like; but when they assume, rather in a Taliban-like way, that they have all the answers, then I do feel uncomfortable. I think that doesn’t necessarily do science a service.”20
But perhaps more annoyingly for Hawking and his co-author, The Grand Design was also slammed for its over-familiar tone, and critics accused Hawking and Mlodinow (who had once worked as a consultant for Star Trek: The Next Generation) of trivializing science. One reviewer declared: “The air inside this literary biosphere is not especially pleasant to breathe; [The Grand Design] is full of ‘yuks’ such as: ‘If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse’ (Oh, my). This is the sort of book that introduces the legendary physicist Richard Feynman as ‘a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road.’”21
Lucy Hawking was almost twenty when her parents’ marriage ended, and in many ways she remained the only form of glue that connected Stephen with his ex-wife and children during the decade and a half between 1990 and 2005 (when Hawking’s second marriage had, but for the paperwork, ended). When his parents separated, Robert Hawking, the eldest of the three siblings, was already moving into a career in IT that would soon lead him to emigrate to America; and Timothy, the youngest, only eleven in 1990, was perhaps the most profoundly disturbed by it. With the stoicism of each of her parents and being old enough to rationalize the trauma of a family self-destructing, Lucy remained the closest of the children to her father.
As the terrible split between Stephen and Elaine was at its most intense and claims of abuse were flying around, Lucy was facing her own traumas. She had married Alex Mackenzie Smith in 1998, and they had a son William (born in 1997) who suffers from autism, but by 2004 the marriage had fallen apart. Lucy started to crumble under the pressure. She fell into alcoholism and spent a month at a treatment facility, the Meadows in Arizona, which she endearingly refers to as “the looney bin,” before bouncing back.22 The pain she had faced over these years gave her added impetus to try to reinvigorate her relationship with her father and to build bridges between Stephen and his other children and with his ex-wife.
By 2006, Lucy, a single mother earning a living as a journalist and with two novels behind her (Jaded [2004] and Run For Your Life [2005]), had conceived of a book for young people that would explain complex ideas in the field in which her father was a world authority. She had the original ideas and a way in which the books should be styled and written; her father had the world-famous name and the technical knowledge; they made a perfect match. A third collaborator, a former Ph.D. student of Hawking’s, Christophe Galfard, who could translate the complex science into user-friendly concepts for Lucy, completed the team.
In one respect, history was repeating itself. We have seen how Stephen Hawking conceived of and wrote A Brief History of Time because he needed a way to pay for 24-hour nursing care and to finance the education of his children; now Lucy needed to earn a steady income to support her son. The result is a series of books (four published to date) which each feature the characters George and Annie, who access the Universe through a computer called Cosmos. It covers some cutting-edge physics but is aimed squarely at a young audience. “We want to inspire children’s curiosity and fire their imagination,” Lucy says of the books. “I’m the creative writer and obviously he’s a very famous theoretical physicist. He has this great enthusiasm for explaining complicated subjects in simple terminology. We brought different skills to the project. I’m not about to start correcting his physics. We did have some disagreements. They were largely when I wanted to do something creatively which would involve bending the rules of physics.”23
January 8, 2012, was a very special date—Stephen Hawking’s seventieth birthday. Although the average lifespan for a British male is not far short of eighty, the number “seventy” when applied to age has always had a weighted meaning—the Biblical “three score years and ten”—and yet here was the Director of Research at Cambridge, who at the age of twenty-one had been diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live, still working, still surviving.
A symposium at the university was organized for the big day; but, sadly, Hawking was not well enough to attend. Another bout of pneumonia kept him in Addenbrookes until two days before the event, and he took medical advice to rest at home; but the public symposium went ahead with guest speakers Astronomer Royal Lord Rees and Hawking’s best friend, Professor Kip Thorne. Hawking had of course prepared a speech that he was to deliver to an enthusiastic gathering of scientists, businessmen, and celebrities including Richard Branson and Cambridge University alumna model Lily Cole, and this was played over the sound system.
Entitled “A Brief History of Mine,” it offered him the chance to talk about some aspects of his personal life and to offer inspirational words on the future of physics and man’s place in the Universe. “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the Universe exist,” he said. “Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the past 40 years, and I’m happy if I’ve made a small contribution. The fact that we humans—who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature—have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our Universe is a great triumph.”24
Of course, the milestone of Hawking’s seventieth birthday sparked seemingly endless articles in the press, going over the by-now very familiar ground concerning the man’s past and health along with the usual hyperbole and exaggeration. “The former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein,” trumpeted the BBC.25 It is certain that there would have been many scientists around the world gnashing their teeth at that statement.
Hawking himself, though, was more interested in keeping his survival to the fore, remarking: “I have been lucky that my condition has progressed more slowly than is often the case. But it shows that one need not lose hope.” He is of course also aware of the hype and overstatement in the way the press insist upon deifying him. “I’m sure my disability has a bearing on why I’m well known,
” he admitted. “People are fascinated by the contrast between my limited physical powers and the vast nature of the Universe I deal with.” Adding modestly: “I’m the archetype of the disabled genius or, should I say, a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I’m obviously physically challenged. Whether I’m a genius is open to doubt.”26 Hawking expresses the opinion that he is merely “lucky” to have survived so long, but this is actually only part of the picture. Although only around one percent of cases of the illness progress very slowly, serendipity is a minor player in the story of how ALS has run its course with Hawking.
According to Leo Cluskey, an Associate Professor of Neurology and Medical Director of the ALS Center at the University of Pennsylvania, there are several important factors to consider when trying to understand how Stephen Hawking is pretty much a unique case. “One thing that is highlighted by this man’s course is that this is an incredibly variable disorder in many ways. Life expectancy,” Professor Cluskey says, “. . . turns on two things: the motor neurons running the diaphragm—the breathing muscles. So the common way people die is of respiratory failure. And the other thing is the deterioration of swallowing muscles, and that can lead to malnutrition and dehydration. If you don’t have these two things, you could potentially live for a long time—even though you’re getting worse. What’s happened to him is just astounding. He’s certainly an outlier.”27
Another neurologist, Nigel Leigh, a Professor of Clinical Neurology at King’s College, London, concurs: “He is exceptional. I am not aware of anyone else who has survived with [ALS] as long. What is unusual is not only the length of time, but that the disease seems to have burnt out. He appears to be relatively stable. This kind of stabilisation is extremely rare.”28
