New Makers of Modern Culture

HAWKING, Stephen William b. 1942
English theoretical physicist

Born on the three hundredth anniversary of Galileo's death, January 8th 1942, Stephen Hawking took a first degree in Natural Science at Oxford University before moving to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to study for a PhD in cosmology. Made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1975, he had earlier become a fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1980—a post once held by, amongst several distinguished others, Sir Isaac Newton. It was, however, during his last year as an Oxford undergraduate that, aged twenty-one, Hawkins was diagnosed with the disorder that has given him, in the public mind at least, near-iconic status: amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a type of motor neuron disease that has confined him to a wheelchair. Given no more than three years to live, he startled everyone by his capacity to survive, despite further physical setbacks. In 1985, following an attack of pneumonia and a tracheostomy, he lost the power of speech except with the aid of an electronic voice synthesiser that lends his utterances an unearthly, metallic frost curiously appropriate to his best-known subject-matter: outer space.

A few more years, and Hawking was barely able to move any part of his body. Yet the crafting of a computer attached to his wheelchair has enabled him to lead if not a normal life—though he has had two wives and three children—then a remarkably productive one. As well as continuing to write scientific papers of high calibre, he has authored a series of popular expositions, among them A Brief History of Time (1988), a challenging survey of modern astrophysics that, translated into thirty languages and more, became a runaway bestseller. That the man who, more than any other, has dared address the mysteries of the universe in language the layman may, with a little effort, understand should also be chronically disabled has proved an irresistible combination for the media. Among many celebrity forays, his synthetic voice has featured on an album by the Pink Floyd rock band, and in The Simpsons, the American cult cartoon series in which Hawkins appears as one of the characters. By some he is perceived as the unlikely embodiment of the Good Scientist, his gallantry and childlike wonder at the phenomena he investigates a welcome redemption of a profession whose reputation has become increasingly tarnished by the discovery and invention of a succession of processes and artefacts inimical to human wellbeing, most obviously weapons of mass destruction and the various agents of global warming.

Hawking's own reputation, as a serious scientist, is keyed to his work on theoretical cosmology and quantum mechanics, from the time he was a post-graduate at Cambridge. In 1965, following a lead provided by Roger Penrose, he offered a mathematical proof that *Einstein's theory of General Relativity necessitates the 'big bang' explanation of the origin of the known universe—an idea originally floated by Edwin Hubble in 1929. Such an event was described by Hawking as a 'singularity', a point where the known laws of physics do not pertain. Another singularity is the 'big crunch', when, having ceased expanding, the universe will finally collapse back in on itself. Parallel work on 'black holes', which Hawking saw as lesser singularities generated by certain types of collapsed stars, brought him face to face with apparent inconsistencies between General Relativity and quantum theory, in particular *Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle', which posits that at the sub-atomic level predictability (hitherto the touchstone of valid science) fails. Much of Hawking's subsequent work has been dedicated to the elusive search for an overarching theory that will reconcile the two, seemingly incontrovertible main currents of modern physics, and therefore, in his own words, 'explain everything'.

A gifted mathematician, Hawking has often been prepared to revise his own theories and findings, while sometimes allowing a fecund imagination to stimulate speculation. Thus, early on, while subscribing to the conventional view that black holes are sealed lacunae in the observable universe, he was prepared to discuss the possibility that they may contain 'wormholes' that might give access to 'alternative universes'. But from around 1974 he began promoting a revised understanding of black holes. Drawing on quantum mechanics, he suggested both that they may emit a form of radiation (which previously had been denied), and that their mass may contract, even to the point of extinction—a theory known as 'the Hawking process'. Then, at the Seventeenth International Congress on General Relativity and Gravitation, held at Dublin in 2004, he went one step further: it might after all be possible to understand what goes on in a black hole, once its disordered gravitational emissions are decoded.

Hawking's purely scientific output is highly technical, and not all his peers have managed either to keep up with him, or to agree with his theoretical positions. No other contemporary physicist, however, has had a greater impact on the popular imagination. His is a world packed with such imponderables as 'event horizons', 'dark matter', 'imaginary time', 'super-strings' and 'p-branes', as well as black holes themselves. Famously, in A Brief History of Time, he wrote that to fully understand the universe might be to 'know the mind of God', although he has rejected any belief in a 'personal' deity, and has tended instead to the view that any concept of the divine is irrelevant to the pursuits of scientific knowledge. Rather, with all its many hypotheses, the extraordinarily ambitious cosmogony he strives for may be seen as, in part, a product of the secularist culture he inhabits, just as secularism itself is in part a product of the sort of theoretical science he practices.

In 1989 Hawking was made a Companion of Honour -- one of scores of honours that have been heaped upon him, though (to date) no Nobel Prize. Despite his disability, he is also recognized as an able and inspiring teacher. His eventual legacy is likely to rest in the hands of the many post-graduates who have come under his supervision.

Justin Wintle

Hawking's other publications include: The Large Scale Structure of Space-time (with George Ellis, 1975); Black Holes and Baby Universes (essays, 1993); The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Roger Penrose et al., 1997); The Universe in a Nutshell (2001); On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy (2002). See: John Gribbin and Michael White: Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (1992); G.W. Gibbons and E.P.S. Shellard eds., The Future of Theoretical Physics and Cosmology: Celebrating Stephen Hawking's 60th Birthday (2003).

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