Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking (8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018) was an English astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author. He was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. From 1979 to 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. This is considered one of the most important academic jobs in the world.

Hawking was born in Oxford, in a family of doctors. In 1959, when he was 17, he started his studies at University College, Oxford. He earned a first-class BA degree in physics there. In 1962, he began graduate study at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1966, he earned his PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. His research focused on general relativity and cosmology.

In 1963, when he was 21, Hawking was told he had a motor neurone disease. It progressed slowly but over many years it made it harder and harder for him to move. Eventually he lost his speech. After that, he communicated using a speech-generating device. At first he used a handheld switch. Later, he used a single cheek muscle to control it.

Hawking worked with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems, which are ideas that fit within general relativity. He also predicted that black holes give off radiation. This is often called Hawking radiation. At first, many scientists disagreed with this idea. By the late 1970s, however, most had accepted it as a major step forward in physics. He was the first to describe a theory of cosmology that combined general relativity and quantum mechanics. He supported the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He also introduced the idea of a micro black hole.

Hawking also wrote several books of popular science, which explained his theories and ideas about the universe in a way that many people could enjoy. His book A Brief History of Time stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society and a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He also received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States. In 2002, the BBC ranked him number 25 in its poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. He died in 2018 at the age of 76. He had lived more than 50 years after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

Early life

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford. His parents were Frank and Isobel Eileen Hawking. His mother came from a family of doctors in Glasgow, Scotland. His wealthy great-grandfather, from Yorkshire, lost his money during the great agricultural depression. Both of his parents went to the University of Oxford. Frank studied medicine, and Isobel studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Frank was a medical researcher who specialised in tropical diseases. In 1950, his father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. The family then moved to St Albans. The family was seen as very eccentric. They travelled in a converted London taxicab. Once, they spent four months in Mallorca with the poet Robert Graves.

Hawking started school at the Byron House School in Highgate, London. Later, he said that its "progressive methods" made it harder for him to learn to read. He went to St Albans High School for Girls for a short time. Then he attended two private (i.e. fee-paying) schools. He went to Radlett School first, and then to St Albans School, Hertfordshire. He had passed the eleven-plus a year early. With help from the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, he built a computer from clock parts and a telephone switchboard. He won a scholarship to University College, Oxford. At first, he was bored there. Later, he became a popular student. He joined the University College Boat Club, where he coxed a rowing crew. He then earned a first-class degree in physics. After that, he began graduate study at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, which is part of the University of Cambridge. His supervisor was Dennis William Sciama. Later, he questioned the work of Fred Hoyle and Jayant Narlikar.

Career

When Hawking began his doctoral studies, scientists were debating two main ideas about how the universe was created: the Big Bang and Steady-state theories. Inspired by Roger Penrose, he used similar thinking on the whole universe. He wrote his thesis on this topic in 1965. He received a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge and earned his PhD in March 1966. In 1974, he said that black holes give off radiation, now known as Hawking radiation. At first many people disagreed with this idea, but by the late 1970s most scientists accepted it. Also in 1974, Hawking became a professor at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he made a science bet with his friend Kip Thorne. In 1979, he was chosen as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. In 1988, he published the popular book A Brief History of Time with Bantam Books. It became a huge success and had sold about 9 million copies by 2009.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Hawking kept sharing science with the public. The documentary A Brief History of Time, directed by Errol Morris, came out in 1991. Hawking also worked with others on a idea called top-down cosmology. He took part in research connected with CERN. He had bet that the Higgs boson, an idea Peter Higgs shared in 1964, would never be found. It was discovered in 2012, after the Large Hadron Collider was built. Hawking admitted he had lost the bet. In 2007, he and his daughter Lucy wrote the children's book George's Secret Key to the Universe. He retired as Lucasian Professor in 2009 but kept working at Cambridge. In 2015, he helped start Breakthrough Initiatives, a project that looks for extraterrestrial life. His last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, was published in 2018.

Personal views

See also: Contemporary philosophy

See also: Future of Earth, Human impact on the environment, and Futures studies

At Google's Zeitgeist Conference in 2011, Stephen Hawking said that "philosophy is dead." He felt that philosophers had not kept up with modern science, and that science could answer some philosophical questions. He also said that "love, faith, and morality belong to a different category to physics."

In 2006, Hawking asked how the human race could survive another 100 years. He worried that life on Earth could be put at risk by a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, global warming, an asteroid collision, or other dangers. He thought human extinction could be avoided if people could live on other planets. He saw spaceflight and the settling of space as necessary for the future of humanity. He also warned that superintelligent artificial intelligence could shape humanity's future. He said the real danger was that such an AI might not share our goals. He thought that aliens probably exist, but that contact with them should be avoided.

Hawking did not rule out God in his early work, but he later became an atheist. He believed that "there is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either." He compared the brain to a computer that stops working when its parts fail.

Hawking was a long-time supporter of the Labour Party. He criticised the Conservative Party for planned cuts to the National Health Service, and he supported universal health care. He was especially worried about privatisation of healthcare in the UK. He also supported a universal basic income. He voted against Scottish independence in the 2014 referendum. Hawking strongly opposed Brexit, the UK's decision to leave the European Union, because he believed it would weaken the UK's role in global science. He encouraged action to stop climate change. He criticised U.S. president Donald Trump for pulling out of the Paris Agreement. Hawking also supported nuclear disarmament and stem cell research. He believed the U.S. 2003 invasion of Iraq was a war crime.

Personal life

Hawking met his future wife, Jane Wilde, at a party in 1962. The next year, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease. The couple married in 1965 and had three children. Hawking did not often talk about his illness. Jane took care of much of the home and family. Their marriage was hard for many years. After they divorced in 1995, Hawking married his nurse, Elaine Mason. They divorced in 2006, and he became close to Jane and his children again. Jane's memoir was made into the film The Theory of Everything in 2014.

Over many years, Hawking's illness slowly paralysed him, which means he could no longer move his body. He began using a wheelchair. After a tracheotomy in 1985, he lost the ability to speak. He then used a computer program to communicate. Later, he worked with researchers at Intel on new ways for him to type. In 2007, he flew on a special plane to experience weightlessness. This was a test to see if he could handle the forces of spaceflight. He had hoped to travel to space, and Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic offered him a free flight.

Death

Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, at the age of 76. His family said he "died peacefully". Many people in science, entertainment, politics, and other fields paid tribute to him. The flag of Gonville and Caius College flew at half-mast, and students and visitors signed a book of condolences there. On 18 March, at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Paralympics in South Korea, International Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons gave a tribute to him. His private funeral took place on 31 March at Great St Mary's Church in Cambridge. Guests included actors Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, who played Stephen and Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May came, and so did actress and model Lily Cole, a friend of Stephen's. Actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Hawking in the film Hawking (2004), gave a reading. So did astronaut Tim Peake, astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, and astrophysicist Kip Thorne. Although Hawking was an atheist, the funeral had a traditional Anglican service.

After the cremation, a service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey on 15 June 2018. His ashes were interred in the Abbey's nave, between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. His memorial stone reads "Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking 1942–2018". It also includes an equation about the temperature of Hawking radiation given off by black holes. He had asked for this equation as his epitaph at least fifteen years before he died. In June 2018, it was announced that a speech of Hawking's, set to music by Vangelis, would be sent into space. It would be beamed from a European Space Agency satellite dish in Spain toward A0620-00, one of the nearest known black holes to Earth.

On 8 November 2018, an auction sold 22 of Hawking's personal possessions, including his wheelchair and his document for Properties of Expanding Universes. It raised about £1.8 million. The money from the wheelchair went to the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Stephen Hawking Foundation. The money from the other items went to his estate. In March 2019, it was announced that the Royal Mint would issue a 50p coin in his honour. It would only be sold as a special commemorative edition. In May 2021, an agreement between HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Cambridge University Library, Science Museum Group, and the Hawking Estate was announced. It meant about 10,000 pages of his papers would stay in Cambridge. His wheelchairs, speech synthesisers, and personal items would go to the Science Museum in London. In October 2024, the Hawking Building of the Science and Innovation Park in Swindon, England, opened to the public. It holds most of the Science Museum Group's object collection.

Media depictions

Hawking appeared in several documentaries. These include God, the Universe and Everything Else (1988), The Real Stephen Hawking (2001), Stephen Hawking: Profile (2002), and Hawking (2013). He also appeared in the documentary series Stephen Hawking, Master of the Universe (2008). In 1992, he chose music for the radio programme Desert Island Discs. He said the music would "sum up my life." His choices included Mozart's Requiem, The Beatles' "Please Please Me," and Édith Piaf's "Non, je ne regrette rien." He also chose Francis Poulenc's Gloria, Johannes Brahms' Violin Concerto, and Ludwig van Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15. Other picks were Richard Wagner's Die Walküre, Act 1, and part of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. For his book, he chose George Eliot's Middlemarch. In 1993, his computer voice was recorded for the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking." In 1999, it was recorded for an episode of The Simpsons. Hawking allowed his voice to be used in The Theory of Everything. In that film, he was played by Eddie Redmayne, who won an Academy Award for the role.

In 1993, Hawking appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation as a holographic version of himself. He also made guest appearances on the TV comedies Futurama and The Big Bang Theory. In March 2018, before he died, his voice was heard on the radio series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where he played The Book Mark II. He also was a guest of Neil deGrasse Tyson on StarTalk. In 2014, he was part of the Monty Python Live (Mostly) show. He appeared in a pre-recorded video singing Monty Python's "Galaxy Song." He also appeared with Brian Cox and his wheelchair. Hawking also appeared in adverts for several products. These included a wheelchair brand, National Savings, British Telecom, Specsavers, Egg Banking, and Go Compare. In 2015, he applied to trademark his name. In 2022, Google Doodle showed Hawking on its homepage to mark his 80th birthday.

Awards and honours

Hawking received many awards and honours. In 1974 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). The people who nominated him said he had made major contributions to general relativity, using new mathematical methods. He was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1984), the American Philosophical Society (1984), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1992). In 1992 he became an honorary member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. In the 1989 Birthday Honours, he was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH).

In 1981, Hawking received the American Franklin Medal. In the 1982 New Year Honours, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). Later he received the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985), the Paul Dirac Medal (1987), and, together with Penrose, the Wolf Prize (1988). In 1986 he became an Academician at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. It is reported that in the late 1990s he turned down a knighthood, because he disagreed with the UK's science funding policy. In 2002, after a vote across the UK, the BBC included him in its list of the 100 Greatest Britons. He received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society (2006), the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour (2009), and the Russian Special Fundamental Physics Prize (2013). Several buildings were named after him. These include the Stephen W. Hawking Science Museum in San Salvador, El Salvador, the Stephen Hawking Building in Cambridge, and the Stephen Hawking Centre at the Perimeter Institute in Canada. Because of his work on time, he unveiled the mechanical "Chronophage" (or time-eating) Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge in September 2008. In July 2017 he was given an Honorary Doctorate from Imperial College London. In 2015 he received the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences, which he shared with Viatcheslav Mukhanov. They were recognised for discovering that galaxies formed from quantum fluctuations in the early Universe. At the 2016 Pride of Britain Awards, he received a lifetime achievement award "for his contribution to science and British culture". After Theresa May presented the award, Hawking jokingly asked her not to ask him for help with Brexit.

The Hawking Fellowship

Main article: Hawking Fellowship

In 2017, the Cambridge Union Society set up the Professor Stephen Hawking Fellowship, working with Hawking. Each year it is given to a person who has made an outstanding contribution to STEM fields and to public discussion, with a focus on young people. Each fellow gives a lecture on a topic they choose, called the "Hawking Lecture". Hawking accepted the first fellowship himself and gave the first Hawking Lecture during his last public appearance before he died.

Medal for Science Communication

Hawking was a member of the advisory board of the Starmus Festival and helped promote science communication. The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, started in 2016, is given each year to members of the arts community who help people become more aware of science. The medal has a portrait of Hawking by Alexei Leonov. The other side shows Leonov during the first spacewalk, along with the "Red Special", the guitar of Brian May, since music is another big part of the Starmus Festival. The Starmus III Festival in 2016 was a tribute to Hawking, and the book of its lectures, "Beyond the Horizon", was also dedicated to him. Hawking chose the first medal winners himself: composer Hans Zimmer, physicist Jim Al-Khalili, and the science documentary film Particle Fever (2013).

Publications

Stephen Hawking wrote many books for general readers. His most famous was A Brief History of Time. He also wrote Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, My Brief History, and Brief Answers to the Big Questions. He worked with other scientists on some books, including The Grand Design. He also wrote a book with Roger Penrose called The Nature of Space and Time. He wrote a series of children's stories, George's Secret Key to the Universe, with his daughter Lucy.

His life and work were shown in films and television shows. One was a film called The Theory of Everything, in which Eddie Redmayne played Hawking. Another was a BBC television film called Hawking, in which Benedict Cumberbatch played him. Hawking also wrote many scientific papers for experts to read.