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The public face of Stephen Hawking is unforgettable. The scientific genius who has mastered the secrets of the universe and at the same time deals with a profound and worsening disability, motor neurone disease. Long-time friend and colleague of Hawking, Professor Roger Penrose, says: 'I think Stephen, because of his condition, is treated rather as some kind of oracle. It's not his fault, of course.' In reply, Hawking claims: 'All over the world people want a hero of science like Einstein. My ambition was to understand the universe, not to be famous.' Early days Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, eldest child of middle-class but unconventional parents. He was a talkative child, but not precocious – he learnt to read late. His father, Dr Frank Hawking, a medical scientist who travelled the world researching tropical diseases, encouraged his son's curiosity. Hawking, who went to a public school in St Albans, did not like conventional lessons, his handwriting was terrible and he was not competitive, says his mother. He was often near the bottom of the class. But by the age of 10, he knew he wanted to be a scientist. He liked designing complicated Meccano models, and at the age of 16 he and his school friends designed and built a working computer out of parts of old machines. He spoke quickly, a characteristic his friends labeled Hawkingese. His final school report said 'He will go far.' Following in his father's footsteps, he applied to University College, Oxford, arriving in 1959, aged 17, to read physics and mathematics. He liked drinking and parties, and was a keen member of the college rowing club. He took a relaxed attitude to his studies but this did not prevent Hawking achieving academic success. He left Oxford with a first-class degree and moved to Cambridge to take a PhD in cosmology. There, the symptoms of motor neurone disease first became apparent – lack of co-ordination, falls and confusion. Life changes Motor neurone disease was diagnosed, and doctors told him he had just two years to live. 'Why should this happen to me?' he says. 'It wasn't fair. But then I realised life wasn't fair. I saw a boy in the next bed in hospital die of leukaemia. Clearly, I was better off than him.' Father Powney, a college friend, sees this moment as a turning point: 'I think he was determined that he would leave behind him something of real value and that was what spurred him to start working.' At this point Hawking became driven. His PhD, on black holes and the Big Bang, was an impressive tour-de-force. Shortly after he finished it, in July 1965, Hawking married 21-year-old Jane Wild, a language student from St Albans. He got a job as a research fellow at the department of applied maths and theoretical physics at Cambridge, and the newly-weds moved into a tiny house close to the university. Two years later, they had their first child, Robert, then two more. A brief history of genius Hawking set out straight away to answer the big questions. How do relativity (science of the very large) and quantum mechanics (science of the very small) come together in the moments before the Big Bang. Or rather, how does the Big Bang create the laws of the Universe? In 1985, on a working trip to Geneva, Hawking caught pneumonia. He was unable to breathe and was given a tracheotomy operation, allowing him to breathe through a hole in his windpipe. The operation meant he would never speak naturally again. Some years later he got the familiar electronic voice synthesiser, which added to his distinctive public persona. Since then he has been offered more realistic voices, but has always refused, preferring to stick with the 1980s rather robotic sounding telephone answering voice. In spring 1988, Hawking published A Brief History of Time which has since sold 10 million copies. In it Hawking promised that within 20 years he would have worked out how and why the universe began. In 1995, he separated and divorced his wife, and later married one of his nurses, Elaine. This second marriage ended in a storm of controversy a few years later: Stephen has never verified the claims of abuse. Now, Hawking is 66 years of age, and it is 20 years since he promised he'd have the answer to everything, but the final theory still eludes him. In his position as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, he is still going strong and ever optimistic. |
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