The genius who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair

What you need to know:

  • Barely into his 20s, a strange disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements.
  • Doctors gave him only three years to live.
  • Yet for more than 50 years Stephen Hawking, who died on Wednesday, roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe.

 

Stephen W Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.

“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview.

Hawking did that largely through his book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything,” was nominated for several Academy Awards, and Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.

Scientifically, Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.

What is equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in 1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only a few years to live.

MENTAL FACULTIES UNTOUCHED

The disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.

He went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring gravity and the properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and dense that not even light can escape them.

That work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Hawking set out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic reality, to black holes.

In a long and daunting calculation, Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle, leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over the eons.

That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title “Black Hole Explosions?,” is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.

The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers — and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.

“You can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,” Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don’t think he will survive it.

“On the other hand,” he added, “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”

'BEAUTIFUL PAPER'

Dennis W Sciama, a cosmologist and Hawking’s thesis adviser at Cambridge, called Hawking’s thesis in Nature “the most beautiful paper in the history of physics.”

In 2002, Hawking said he wanted the formula for Hawking radiation to be engraved on his tombstone.

He was a man who pushed the limits — in his intellectual life, to be sure, but also in his professional and personal lives. He travelled the globe to scientific meetings, visiting every continent, including Antarctica; wrote best-selling books about his work; married twice; fathered three children; and was not above appearing on “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek: The Next Generation” or “The Big Bang Theory.”

He celebrated his 60th birthday by going up in a hot-air balloon. The same week, he also crashed his electric-powered wheelchair while speeding around a corner in Cambridge, breaking his leg.

In April 2007, a few months after his 65th birthday, he took part in a zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727, a padded aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce fleeting periods of weightlessness. It was a prelude to a hoped-for trip to space with Richard Branson’s VirginGalactic company aboard SpaceShipTwo.

Asked why he took such risks, Hawking said, “I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit.”

His own spirit left many in awe.

“What a triumph his life has been,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University cosmologist, the astronomer royal of Britain and Hawking’s longtime colleague. “His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds — a manifestation of amazing willpower and determination.”

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day, he liked to point out, after the death of Galileo, who had begun the study of gravity. His mother, the former Isobel Walker, had gone to Oxford to avoid the bombs that fell nightly during the Blitz of London. His father, Frank Hawking, was a prominent research biologist.

The oldest of four children, Stephen was a mediocre student at St Albans School in London, although his innate brilliance was recognised by some classmates and teachers.

Later, at University College, Oxford, he found his studies in mathematics and physics so easy that he rarely consulted a book or took notes. He got by with a thousand hours of work in three years, or one hour a day, he estimated. “Nothing seemed worth making an effort for,” he said.

The only subject he found exciting was cosmology because, he said, it dealt with “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”

Upon graduation, he moved to Cambridge. Before he could begin his research, however, he was stricken by what his research adviser, Sciama, came to call “that terrible thing.”

The young Hawking had been experiencing occasional weakness and falling spells for several years. Shortly after his 21st birthday, in 1963, doctors told him that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They gave him less than three years to live.

His first response was severe depression. He dreamed he was going to be executed, he said. Then, against all odds, the disease appeared to stabilise. Although he was slowly losing control of his muscles, he was still able to walk short distances and perform simple tasks, although labouriously, like dressing and undressing. He felt a new sense of purpose.

“When you are faced with the possibility of an early death,” he recalled, “it makes you realise that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to do.”

In 1965, he married Jane Wilde, a student of linguistics. Now, by his own account, he not only had “something to live for” but also had to find a job, which gave him an incentive to work seriously toward his doctorate.

His illness, however, had robbed him of the ability to write down the long chains of equations that are the tools of the cosmologist’s trade. Characteristically, he turned this handicap into a strength, gathering his energies for daring leaps of thought, which, in his later years, he often left for others to codify in proper mathematical language.

“People have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,” Hawking said. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of mathematics.”

By necessity, he concentrated on problems that could be attacked through “pictures and diagrams,” adopting geometric techniques to study general relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity.

The discovery of black hole radiation also led to a 30-year controversy over the fate of things that had fallen into a black hole.

Hawking initially said that detailed information about whatever had fallen in would be lost forever because the particles coming out would be completely random, erasing whatever patterns had been present when they first fell in.

Many particle physicists protested that this violated a tenet of quantum physics, which says that knowledge is always preserved and can be retrieved.

Leonard Susskind, a Stanford physicist who carried on the argument for decades, characterised Hawking to his face as “one of the most obstinate people in the world; no, he is the most infuriating person in the universe.” Hawking grinned.

In 1974, Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific organisation; in 1982, he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton. “They say it’s Newton’s chair, but obviously it’s been changed,” he liked to say.

Having conquered black holes, Hawking set his sights on the origin of the universe and on eliminating that pesky singularity at the beginning of time from models of cosmology. If the laws of physics could break down there, they could break down everywhere.

With James Hartle of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, California, Hawking envisioned the history of the universe as a sphere like the Earth. Cosmic time corresponds to latitude, starting with zero at the North Pole and progressing southward.

Although time started there, the North Pole was nothing special; the same laws applied there as everywhere else. Asking what happened before the Big Bang, Hawking said, was like asking what was a mile north of the North Pole — it was not any place, or any time.

In “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a complete theory” of the universe it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”

Until 1974, Hawking was still able to feed himself and to get in and out of bed. At Jane’s insistence, he would drag himself, hand over hand, up the stairs to the bedroom in his Cambridge home every night, in an effort to preserve his remaining muscle tone. After 1980, care was supplemented by nurses.

VOICE PERMANENTLY SILENCED

Hawking retained some control over his speech up to 1985. But on a trip to Switzerland, he came down with pneumonia. The doctors asked Jane if she wanted his life support turned off, but she said no. To save his life, doctors inserted a breathing tube. He survived, but his voice was permanently silenced.

It appeared for a time that he would be able to communicate only by pointing at individual letters on an alphabet board. But when a computer expert, Walter Woltosz, heard about Hawking’s condition, he offered him a program he had written called Equalizer. By clicking a switch with his still-functioning fingers, Hawking was able to browse through menus that contained all the letters and more than 2,500 words.

Word by word — and, when necessary, letter by letter — he could build up sentences on the computer screen and send them to a speech synthesiser that vocalised for him. The entire apparatus was fitted to his motorised wheelchair.

Even when too weak to move a finger, he communicated through the computer by way of an infrared beam, which he activated by twitching his right cheek or blinking his eye. The system was expanded to allow him to open and close the doors in his office and to use the telephone and internet without aid.

Although he averaged fewer than 15 words per minute, Hawking found he could speak through the computer better than he had before losing his voice. His only complaint, he confided, was that the speech synthesiser, manufactured in California, had given him an American accent.

One of the reasons he wrote A Brief History of Time to earn enough money to pay for his children’s education. He did. The book’s extraordinary success made him wealthy, a hero to disabled people everywhere and even more famous.

The news media followed his movements and activities over the years. Asked by New Scientist magazine what he thought about most, Hawking answered: “Women. They are a complete mystery.”

In 1990, Hawking and his wife separated after 25 years of marriage; Jane Hawking wrote about their years together in two books, Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen Hawking and Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen. The latter became the basis of the 2014 movie The Theory of Everything.

In 1995, he married Elaine Mason, a nurse who had cared for him since his bout of pneumonia. She had been married to David Mason, the engineer who had attached Hawking’s speech synthesiser to his wheelchair.

In 2004, British newspapers reported that the Cambridge police were investigating allegations that Elaine had abused Hawking, but no charges were filed, and Hawking denied the accusations. They agreed to divorce in 2006.

A complete list of survivors was not immediately available, but Wednesday morning, his children, Robert, Lucy and Tim, released a statement:

“We are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We will miss him forever.”

Among his many honours, Hawking was named a commander of the British Empire in 1982. In the summer of 2012, he had a star role in the opening of the Paralympics Games in London. The only thing lacking was the Nobel Prize, and his explanation for this was characteristically pithy: “The Nobel is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have worked on.”

Hawking was a strong advocate of space exploration, saying it was essential to the long-term survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of,” he told an audience in Hong Kong in 2007.

Nothing raised as much furor, however, as his increasingly scathing remarks about religion. One attraction of the no-boundary proposal for Hawking was that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe, like God, to explain how it began.

In A Brief History of Time, he had referred to the “mind of God,” but in “The Grand Design,” a 2011 book he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, he was bleaker about religion. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set the universe going.”

He went further in an interview that year in The Guardian, saying: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”

Having spent the best part of his life grappling with black holes and cosmic doom, Hawking had no fear of the dark.

 

© 2018 New York Times News Service (Matthew Haag, Matt Stevens and Gerald Jonas contributed reporting).