Background

Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England. His birthday was also the 300th anniversary of the death of Galileo - long a source of pride for the noted physicist. His father, Frank Hawking, came from a family of tenant farmers in Yorkshire who suffered hard times during the agricultural depression at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although financially stretched, the family was able to send Frank to Oxford, where he studied medicine. His research expertise was in tropical medicine, which involved regular field trips to East Africa. At the beginning of the Second World War, despite volunteering for military service, the authorities judged that it would be best if Frank continued his medical research during the war years. Stephen's mother, Isobel Walker, was born in Dunfermline in Scotland, but the family moved to Devon when she was 12. Isobel gained entrance to the University of Oxford, where she studied economics, politics, and philosophy. She then worked for the Inland Revenue, but this proved not to be to her taste and she subsequently became a school teacher. She was a free-thinking radical and a strong influence on her son.

Education

In Highgate, Stephen was educated at the progressive Byron House School. In 1950 Stephen's father moved to the Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill. The family moved to St Albans so that the journey to Mill Hill was easier. Stephen attended St Albans High School for Girls (which took boys up to the age of 10). When he was older he attended St Albans school but his father wanted him to take the scholarship examination to go to Westminster public school. However, Stephen was ill at the time of the examinations and remained at St Albans school which he had attended from the age of 11.

Hawking wanted to specialize in mathematics in his last couple of years at school where his mathematics teacher had inspired him to study the subject. However, Hawking's father was strongly against the idea and Hawking was persuaded to make chemistry his main school subject. Part of his father's reasoning was that he wanted Hawking to go to University College, Oxford, the College he himself had attended, and that College had no mathematics fellow.

In March 1959 Hawking took the scholarship examinations with the aim of studying natural sciences at Oxford. He was awarded an exhibition, despite feeling that he had performed badly, and at University College he specialised in physics in his natural sciences degree.

From Oxford, Hawking moved to Cambridge to take up research in general relativity and cosmology, a difficult area for someone with only a little mathematical background. Hawking had noticed that he was becoming rather clumsy during his last year at Oxford and, when he returned home for Christmas 1962 at the end of his first term at Cambridge, his mother persuaded him to see a doctor.

In early 1963 he spent two weeks having tests in hospital and motor neurone disease (Lou Gehrig's disease) was diagnosed. His condition deteriorated quickly and the doctors predicted that he would not live long enough to complete his doctorate. However, Hawking writes: "... although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found to my surprise that I was enjoying life in the present more than I had before. I began to make progress with my research..."

After completing his doctorate in 1966 Hawking was awarded a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Career

In 1964, Stephen needed a job to support a family. The originality of his work soon resulted in a succession of positions. The first step on the ladder was a research fellowship of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which was to remain his college for the rest of his life. This was followed by an appointment as a staff member of the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy during the most exciting period of its existence from 1968 to 1972. In 1969 he was elected to full fellowship of Gonville and Caius College for Distinction in Science. After the creation of the Institute of Astronomy in 1972, Stephen remained there as a research assistant for two years before gaining a more permanent status at DAMTP. By this time, the originality and importance of Stephen's work was recognized worldwide and he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 at the exceptionally early age of 32. He would receive the Society's highest honor, the Copley Medal, in 2006.

Stephen, with his family, visited Caltech in Pasadena for the academic year 1974 to 1975 as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar, Caltech's highest award. He found Caltech and California exhilarating. At that time, the facilities were much better than in Cambridge and there were ramps everywhere for his wheelchair, installed for the community at his behest. Among the important events of the visit, Stephen gave a major seminar about Hawking radiation at Caltech in the presence of Richard Feynman ForMemRS. During the year at Caltech, Stephen was awarded the Pius XI medal and flew to Rome to receive it. He insisted on visiting the Vatican archives to read the recantation of Galileo, with whom he always felt a strong affinity.

This was the beginning of Stephen's long-term relationship with Caltech. From 1991 to 2013, Stephen visited Caltech for several weeks nearly every year as a Fairchild Scholar. From this base, his long-term research collaboration with James Hartle at the University of California, Santa Barbara, flourished and he developed close ties to Hollywood, which resulted in appearances on The Big Bang theory, Star Trek and The Simpsons. These distinctive appearances on screen helped to cement his role as a public icon for science.

As Kip Thorne has described: "Stephen lost the use of his hands for writing equations in the early to mid 1970s, with the final, complete loss occurring during his 1974–75 year with me as a Fairchild Scholar at Caltech. [Much of his research at that time] was in classical general relativity, and involved problems that could be cast in the language of geometry and topology. As he lost the use of his hands, he developed an amazing ability to visualize and manipulate in his head geometric and topological concepts and relationships, and much of his breakthrough research relied on this. It appears to me that his disability was a partial blessing in that it drove him to develop this ability to the point that it gave him insights that he might never have achieved otherwise."

In 1979, Stephen was appointed to one of the most distinguished posts in the university as the seventeenth holder of the Lucasian Chair of Natural Philosophy, some 310 years after Isaac Newton (FRS, PRS 1703) became its second holder. Stephen held this chair with distinction for 30 years until reaching the retirement age in 2009, after which he held a special research professorship, thanks to a generous endowment by the Avery–Tsui Foundation. Dennis Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery had earlier provided substantial support to the Stephen Hawking Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in DAMTP.

While in Switzerland in 1985, Stephen contracted pneumonia and a tracheotomy was necessary to save his life. Strangely, after this brush with death, the progression of his degenerative disease seemed to slow to a virtual halt. His tracheotomy prevented any form of speech so that acquiring a computerized speech synthesizer became a necessity. He was sustained, then and thereafter, by a team of helpers and personal assistants, as well as by the family. In the aftermath of this encounter with pneumonia, the Hawkings’ home was almost taken over by nurses and medical attendants, and he and Jane drifted apart.

In his later life, Stephen became increasingly involved in the popularization of science. This began with the astoundingly successful book A brief history of time (66), which was translated into some 35 languages and sold over 10 million copies in the following 20 years. Undoubtedly, the book's brilliant title was a contributory factor to its success and the subject matter gripped the public imagination. There is a directness and clarity of style, which Stephen developed as a matter of necessity when trying to cope with the limitations imposed by his physical disabilities. He could communicate only with great difficulty and expenditure of effort, and so had to make do with short sentences that were directly to the point. In addition, one cannot deny that his physical condition powerfully caught the public's imagination.

Although the dissemination of science among a broader public was certainly one of Stephen's aims in writing the book, he also had the serious purpose of generating income. The financial needs were considerable, owing to the demands of his entourage of family, nurses, healthcare helpers, and increasingly expensive equipment. Some, but far from all, of this was covered by the National Health Service and grants.

To invite Stephen to a conference always involved serious challenges for the organizers. The travel and accommodation expenses were enormous, not least because of the sheer number of accompanying people. Because of his fragile health, he had to fly first class and, in his last years, by private jet or air ambulance. But a popular lecture by Stephen would always be a sell-out, and special arrangements would be needed to find a large enough lecture hall.

In 1998 Stephen lectured at Clinton's White House and returned in 2009 when President Obama presented him with the US Medal of Freedom, a very rare honor for any foreigner. This was just one of the many awards accumulated over his career, including the Companion of Honour from the United Kingdom. In the summer of 2012, he reached perhaps his largest-ever audience in his starring role at the opening ceremony of the London Paralympics.

Stephen clearly enjoyed his fame. He welcomed opportunities to travel and to have unusual experiences. For instance, on a visit to Canada, he was undeterred by having to travel two miles down a mine-shaft to visit the underground Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO). In 1997, the Chilean Air Force took a group of theoretical physicists including Stephen to its base on Isla Rey Jorge on the Antarctic Peninsula. Stephen remarked that, ‘Although my wheelchair has snow chains, they took me for a ride on a snow vehicle.’ He experienced weightlessness in NASA's reduced-gravity aircraft in 2007.

The presentational polish of his public lectures increased with the years. In later years impressive computer-generated visuals were used while he controlled the verbal material, releasing it sentence by sentence in his computer-generated American-accented voice. High-quality pictures and computer-generated graphics also featured in his later popular books, The illustrated brief history of time and The universe in a nutshell, and he lent his support to his daughter Lucy when she wrote her series of six delightful children's adventures in space, beginning with George's secret key to the universe. His last book, published posthumously, was entitled Brief answers to the big questions.

Achievements

• 

  Stephen Hawking worked primarily in the field of general relativity and particularly on the physics of black holes. In 1971 he suggested the formation, following the big bang, of numerous objects containing as much as one billion tons of mass but occupying only the space of a proton. These objects, called mini black holes, are unique in that their immense mass and gravity require that they be ruled by the laws of relativity, while their minute size requires that the laws of quantum mechanics apply to them also. In 1974 Hawking proposed that, in accordance with the predictions of quantum theory, black holes emit subatomic particles until they exhaust their energy and finally explode. Hawking’s work greatly spurred efforts to theoretically delineate the properties of black holes, objects about which it was previously thought that nothing could be known. His work was also important because it showed these properties’ relationship to the laws of classical thermodynamics and quantum mechanics.
  
  Hawking’s contributions to physics earned him many exceptional honors. In 1974 the Royal Society elected him one of its youngest fellows. He became professor of gravitational physics at Cambridge in 1977, and in 1979 he was appointed to Cambridge’s Lucasian professorship of mathematics, a post once held by Isaac Newton. Hawking was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1982 and a Companion of Honour in 1989. He also received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 2006 and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. In 2008 he accepted a visiting research chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
  
  Hawking has the distinction of having lent his voice to the first vinyl record played in the stratosphere. The record "A Glorious Dawn" was part of the Symphony of Science Project, and featured the voices of Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan, as well as music arranged by John Boswell.

Works

More photos

• book

  • A Brief History of Time

    (Told in the language we all can understand, A Brief Histo...)

    1988
  • On The Shoulders Of Giants

    (World-renowned physicist and bestselling author Stephen H...)

    2002
  • God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs that Changed History

    (Bestselling author and physicist Stephen Hawking explores...)

    2005
  • The Large, the Small and the Human Mind

    (Roger Penrose's original and provocative ideas about the ...)

    1997
  • The Grand Design

    (In The Grand Design the authors explain that according to...)

    2010
  • George's Secret Key to the Universe

    (In their bestselling book for young readers, noted physic...)

    2007
  • George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt

    (George and Annie explore the galaxy in this cosmic advent...)

    2009
  • The Universe in a Nutshell

    (Stephen Hawking’s phenomenal, multimillion-copy bestselle...)

    2001
  • Brief Answers to the Big Questions

    (Wired Stephen Hawking was the most renowned scientist sin...)

    2018
  • The Future of Spacetime

    (Where the science of black holes, gravitational waves, an...)

    2002
  • Black Holes and Baby Universes: And Other Essays

    (In his phenomenal bestseller A Brief History of Time, Ste...)

    1993
  • My Brief History

    (Stephen Hawking has dazzled readers worldwide with a stri...)

    2013
  • A Briefer History of Time

    (From one of the most brilliant minds of our time comes an...)

    2005
  • The Nature of Space and Time

    (Penrose, like Einstein, refuses to believe that quantum m...)

    1996
  • The Dreams That Stuff Is Made Of: The Most Astounding Papers of Quantum Physics--and How They Shook the Scientific World

    ("God does not play dice with the universe." So said Alber...)

    2011

• TV series

  • Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking

    (Delve into the mind of the world's most famous living sci...)

    2010

Religion

Hawking was an atheist who claimed that "the universe is governed by the laws of science." He has made a number of provocative comments about the impact the current state of physics might have on the existence of God. In the chapter called "The Origin and Fate of the Universe" in A Brief History of Time, Hawking theorized that "if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?" Some of the physicist's most well-known queries conclude the book: "Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?" Hawking continued that if a unified theory is found, everyone will "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."

Michael D. Lemonick, writing in Time, noted that many Brief History readers have the impression that Hawking is trying to disprove the existence of God. Hawking responded that "you don't need to appeal to God to set the initial conditions for the universe, but that doesn't prove there is no God - only that he acts through the laws of physics."

Politics

Hawking supported the Labour Party. In March 1968, he marched against the Vietnam War. He called the 2003 war in Iraq a "war crime" and participated in anti-war events, and also boycotted the conference in Israel because of disagreement with the policy of the authorities of this country towards the Palestinians. Supported nuclear disarmament, climate change, and universal health care.

He campaigned for the United Kingdom to remain in the European Union, warning Brexit would be a "disaster" for science funding. After the referendum, he said he was "sad about the result," in an article for the Guardian, warning against the "envy and isolationism" he said had driven it and arguing for a fairer sharing of wealth "both within nations and across national borders."

Views

Hawking made his first major contribution to science with his idea of singularity, a work that grew out of his collaboration (working relationship) with Roger Penrose. A singularity is a place in either space or time at which some quantity becomes infinite (without an end). Such a place is found in a black hole, the final stage of a collapsed star, where the gravitational field has infinite strength. Penrose proved that a singularity could exist in the space-time of a real universe.

Drawing upon the work of both Penrose and Albert Einstein (1879–1955), Hawking demonstrated that our universe had its origins in a singularity. In the beginning all of the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single point, making a very small but tremendously dense body. Ten to twenty billion years ago that body exploded in a big bang that initiated time and the universe. Hawking was able to produce current astrophysical (having to do with the study of stars and the events that occur around them) research to support the big bang theory of the origin of the universe and oppose the competing steady-state theory.

Hawking's research led him to study the characteristics of the best-known singularity: the black hole. A black hole's edges, called the event horizon, can be detected. Hawking proved that the surface area (measurement of the surface) of the event horizon could only increase, not decrease and that when two black holes merged the surface area of the new hole was larger than the sum of the two original.

Hawking's continuing examination of the nature of black holes led to two important discoveries. The first, that black holes can give off heat, opposed the claim that nothing could escape from a black hole. The second concerned the size of black holes. As originally conceived, black holes were immense in size because they were the end result of the collapse of gigantic stars. Hawking suggested the existence of millions of mini-black holes formed by the force of the original big bang explosion.

In the 1980s Hawking answered one of Einstein's unanswered theories, the famous unified field theory. A complete unified theory includes the four main interactions known to modern physics. The unified theory explains the conditions that were present at the beginning of the universe as well as the features of the physical laws of nature. When humans develop the unified field theory, said Hawking, they will "know the mind of God."

Hawking believed that developing better technology was imperative for humans’ survival. But he was also very concerned about the pursuit of artificial intelligence, or A.I. "Alongside the benefits, A.I. will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many," he said in 2014 at the launch for the Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge University.

Considering all of Hawking's work in cosmology, people are understandably interested in his opinions on the possibility of alien life. During NASA's 50th anniversary celebration in 2008, Hawking was invited to speak, and he mentioned his thoughts on the subject. He expressed that, given the vastness of the universe, there very well could be primitive alien life out there, and it is possible, other intelligent life. "Primitive life is very common," Hawking said, "and intelligent life is very rare." Of course, he threw in his characteristically sharp humor to say, "Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth." He went on the say that humans should be wary of exposure to aliens because alien life will probably not be DNA-based, and we would not have resistance to diseases.

Quotations: "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge."

"My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all."

"There ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of the universe and what can be more special than that there is no boundary?"

"So Einstein was wrong when he said, "God does not play dice." Consideration of black holes suggests, not only that God does play dice, but that he sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can't be seen."

"Life would be tragic if it weren't funny."

"The victim should have the right to end his life, if he wants. But I think it would be a great mistake. However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do, and succeed at. While there's life, there is hope."

Membership

• 

  Royal Society , United Kingdom

• 

  Pontifical Academy of Sciences , Vatican City

• 

  American Philosophical Society , United States

• 

  National Academy of Sciences , United States

Personality

Stephen enjoyed his work, the company of other scientists, trips to the theatre and the opera, and his travels, which would have exhausted even a fully-fit academic (figure 6). He took great pleasure in children, sometimes entertaining them by swiveling around in his motorized wheelchair. He could be generous and was often very witty; but he also had a mischievous streak, examples including the wagers he made in the formal tradition of the senior combination room of Caius College's wager book. These included the denial of the presence of a black hole in Cygnus X-1, the prediction that the Higgs boson would not be found and, perhaps most significantly, that no information could return through a black hole event horizon - he lost these three wagers. On occasion, he could display something of arrogance that is not uncommon among physicists working at the cutting edge, as well as an autocratic streak. Yet, he could also show true humility. Stephen continued, right until his last decade, to co-author technical papers and speak at premier international conferences, doubly remarkable in a subject where even healthy researchers tend to peak at an early age.

Hawking is frequently compared to Albert Einstein. Though their lives and achievements are different, one area where they are reportedly the same is in their IQs. Hawking’s IQ is recorded at 160, which is also Einstein’s estimated IQ.

Hawking declined a Knighthood from the Queen, explaining in interviews that he "dislikes the whole concept" of titles. His refusal was also due in part to what he sees as the UK Government’s "mishandling" of science funding.

Physical Characteristics: In the early 1960s Hawking contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable degenerative neuromuscular disease. The disease left him paralyzed and completely dependent on others and/or technology for everything: bathing, dressing, eating, mobility and speech. He continued to work despite the disease’s progressively disabling effects.

Quotes from others about the person

• "A few years ago, I had the good fortune to be lecturing in Tokyo at the same time as the cosmologist Stephen Hawking. Walking the streets of Tokyo with Hawking in his wheelchair was an amazing experience. I felt as if I were taking a walk through Galilee with Jesus Christ. Everywhere we went, crowds of Japanese silently streamed after us, stretching out their hands to touch Hawking's wheelchair. Hawking enjoyed the spectacle with detached good humor. I was thinking of an account that I had read of Einstein's visit to Japan in 1922. The crowds had streamed after Einstein as they streamed after Hawking seventy years later." - Freeman Dyson

Interests

• theatre, opera, travelling

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Isaac Newton

• Writers

  George Eliot

• Sport & Clubs

  rowing

• Music & Bands

  Ludwig van Beethoven,
  
  Richard Wagner, Giacomo Puccini, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Igor Stravinsky, The Beatles, Edith Piaf

Connections

At a New Year's party in 1963, Hawking met a young languages undergraduate named Jane Wilde. They were married in 1965. The couple gave birth to a son, Robert, in 1967, and a daughter, Lucy, in 1970. A third child, Timothy, arrived in 1979.

In 1990, Hawking left his wife Jane for one of his nurses, Elaine Mason. The two were married in 1995. The marriage put a strain on Hawking's relationship with his own children, who claimed Elaine closed off their father from them.

In 2003, nurses looking after Hawking reported their suspicions to police that Elaine was physically abusing her husband. Hawking denied the allegations, and the police investigation was called off. In 2006, Hawking and Elaine filed for divorce.

Father:

Frank Hawking

Mother:

Isobel Walker Hawking

Acquaintance:

Richard Dawkins

Wife:

Jane Wilde

Wife:

Elaine Mason

Son:

Robert Hawking

Daughter:

Lucy Hawking

Son:

Timothy Hawking

colleague:

Roger Penrose

Acquaintance:

Jim Parsons

Acquaintance:

Pope Francis

Acquaintance:

Leonard Nimoy

Acquaintance:

Elizabeth II

References

• Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics One of the most influential physicists of our time, Stephen Hawking touched the lives of millions. Recalling his nearly two decades as Hawking’s collaborator and friends, Leonard Mlodinow brings this complex man into focus in a unique and deeply personal portrayal.
  2020
• God, Stephen Hawking and the Multiverse: What Hawking said and why it matters
  2020
• A Stephen Hawking Biography: The Greatest Scientist of Our Time Stephen Hawking is one of the most eminent scientists of his generation, internationally respected and famous for his work. This is his story.
  2017
• Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind Kitty Ferguson, the award-winning and international bestselling author of Stephen Hawking’s biography, presents an even deeper portrait of the legendary physicist’s life and scientific theories.
  1992