Stephen Hawking (10 page)

ALS affects the nerves of the spinal cord and the parts of the brain that produce voluntary motor functions. The cells gradually degenerate over a period of time and cause paralysis as muscles atrophy throughout the body. Apart from this, the brain is unaffected, and the higher functions such as thought and memory are left untouched. The body gradually wastes away, but the patient's mind remains intact. The usual prognosis is gradual immobility, followed by creeping paralysis, leading eventually to death by suffocation or pneumonia as the respiratory muscles seize up. The symptoms are painless, but in the final stages of the disease patients are often given morphine to alleviate chronic depression.

One of the amazing ironies of the situation was that Stephen Hawking just happened to be studying theoretical physics, one of the very few jobs for which his mind was the only real tool he needed. If he had been an experimental
physicist, his career would have been over. Quite naturally this was little compensation to the twenty-one-year-old who, like everyone else, had seen a normal life stretching ahead of him rather than a death sentence from a neurological disease. The doctors had given him two years.

Upon hearing the news, Hawking fell into a deep depression. Fleet Street legend has it that he locked himself away in a darkened room, plummeting into heavy drinking and listening to a great deal of high-volume Wagner while wallowing in a drunken haze of self-pity. However, he has gone on record as saying that the stories of excessive drinking are exaggerated but that, feeling a somewhat “tragic character,”
⁴
he did shut himself away for a while and listened to a lot of music, especially Wagner.

Reports in magazine articles that I drank heavily are an exaggeration. The trouble is, once one article said it, other articles copied it, because it made a good story. Anything that has appeared in print so many times must be true.
⁵

The truth may never be known, but Hawking's recollection of events rings true. The idea of getting totally smashed and staying that way to nullify the mental pain strikes one as an eminently reasonable thing to do in the circumstances. Furthermore, there is evidence to support his assertion. Dennis Sciama, for one, once said that he has no recollection of Hawking disappearing for a long period, as the tabloids have implied. Being used to seeing his students every day during term time, he would have been the first to have noticed Hawking's absence.

However, there is little doubt that he was deeply shocked by the news and experienced a time of deep depression. There seemed very little point in continuing with his research because he might not live long enough to finish his Ph.D. For a while he quite naturally believed that there was nothing to live for. If he was going to die within a few years, then why bother to do anything now? He had never been attracted by religion or any thought of an afterlife, so there was no crumb of comfort to be found there. He would live his span and then die. That was his fate. Being no different from the next person faced with any form of personal tragedy, he kept thinking, “How could something like that happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this?”
⁶

He tells of an experience while he was undergoing tests that made a great impression on him and helped him through those nightmare days back in Cambridge:

While I had been in hospital, I had seen a boy I vaguely knew die of leukemia, in the bed opposite me. It had not been a pretty sight. Clearly there were people who were worse off than me. At least my condition didn't make me feel sick. Whenever I feel inclined to be sorry for myself, I remember that boy.
⁷

He was experiencing some disturbing but poignant dreams at the time. In the hospital, he dreamed that he was going to be executed. He suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things he could do if he were to be reprieved. In another recurring dream he thought that he could sacrifice his life to save others: “After all, if I were going to die anyway, it might as well do some good,” he dreamed.
⁸

After Hawking had dragged himself out of his depression and back to work, his father decided to pay Dennis Sciama a visit. He explained the situation and asked if Stephen could complete his Ph.D. in a shorter time than the three-year minimum because his son might not live that long. Sciama, knowing perhaps better than anyone what his student was really capable of, told Frank Hawking that any idea of finishing in less than three years was impossible. Whether Sciama realized at the time that Hawking would need his work to help him through is another matter; but he knew the rules, and despite the fact that his student may have been dying, they could not be bent to suit him.

Most people believed that the medical predictions were correct and that Hawking had a very short time to live. John McClenahan vividly remembers that, on the eve of his departure to work in America for a year, Hawking's sister Mary had said to him that, if he decided not to return within a year, he would probably never see his friend again. Once it had taken a grip, the disease developed quickly. Jane met Stephen again soon after he was released from the hospital and found him confused and lacking the will to live.

However, there is little doubt that her appearance on the scene was a major turning point in Hawking's life. The two of them began to see a lot more of one another, and a strong relationship developed. It was finding Jane that enabled him to break out of his depression and regenerate some belief in his life and work. Meanwhile, the Ph.D. progressed at a painfully slow rate.

He was not the only student working with Sciama. A South African, George Ellis, had been the supervisor's first student when Sciama had taken up his post in 1961. A year later, Hawking arrived, followed the year after that by two other students who would, along with Ellis, become lifelong friends and colleagues—Brandon Carter and Martin Rees. Together with a number of others, they formed a small group of relativists and cosmologists, all working on slightly different areas within the same field.

They became good friends as well as coworkers, often relaxing in one of the city's pubs in the evening or going to concerts, plays, and films together when they had had enough of talking physics over a pint of beer. There were common interests other than their work. Ellis was always very interested in politics and vehemently anti-apartheid. In Hawking he found a sympathetic set of attitudes, and they would often talk politics. Sitting beside pub fires in the winter and in gardens on summer evenings, the two of them would discuss anything, from the Vietnam War to Black Power. They were all introduced to Jane, of course, and when she made the trip to Cambridge on weekends the whole group would often go out together to eat or to picnic by the river, watching the punts glide by.

During Hawking's first year, he worked with the other students and supervisors in the Phoenix Wing of the Cavendish Laboratory, which had been set up by James Clerk Maxwell in the 1870s. In the early 1960s, the head of the physics department, George Batchelor, managed to persuade the university to establish a separate mathematics and theoretical physics department in what used to be known as the Old University
Press Building on Silver Street. It became known as the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).

The system at Cambridge is such that both undergraduate and postgraduate students are enrolled in one of the colleges, yet work in university buildings with others in the same field but from different colleges. Hawking was a student of Trinity Hall and would eat there in the evenings and be assigned accommodation by the college, but he did not work in Trinity Hall buildings or exclusively with Trinity Hall students and academic staff.

The atmosphere in the physics department was very informal, and Ph.D. students had no rigid timetable or course to follow. The job of the supervisor is to suggest a set of problems or targets and discuss with the student plans of attack and give guidance where necessary. Sciama remembered how, on a number of occasions, he would dash into Hawking's office with a new idea for something his charge was working on, and they would then thrash out the scheme together. At other times, Hawking would go to see Sciama in his office, a fondly remembered place, the walls covered with modern art prints between the shelves of books and papers.

As well as attending lectures at the university, all the Ph.D. students at the DAMTP attended regular seminars, where thirty or forty people would listen to talks given by one of the teaching staff or a visiting lecturer. These would be followed by a general discussion. But the most important place for conversation and exchanging ideas was in the Tea Room. In the twice-daily ritual, well established at the Cavendish and carried over to Silver Street, everyone would meet at
11
A.M.
for coffee and 4
P.M.
for tea to exchange their latest thoughts and ideas. Students shared offices, and their doors were nearly always open to all—there was never any feeling of working secretly or keeping ideas to oneself. It was in this atmosphere of free communication that Hawking happened to stumble upon his first significant project during his early years as a Ph.D. student.

Fred Hoyle was a very big name in the physics department of Cambridge University, widely known for his ideas about the origins of the Universe. An inveterate self-publicist, he was very good at manipulating the media and was of the breed of scientist who would on occasion publicly express unrefereed and unverified theories. His justification for this was simple. He was not an egomaniac or an intellectual cowboy, but to acquire funds for his research he needed to make a public splash, to be internationally famous. Publicity was of the utmost importance to him.

Hoyle had not always been in such an elevated position. The son of a Yorkshire textile merchant, he had entered Cambridge in the 1930s on a full scholarship and had been hardened by the experience of feeling socially inadequate because of his background and strange accent. Although he proved himself intellectually superior to most of his contemporaries, he was changed by the experience and emerged as a difficult customer to deal with. For much of his time as a professor at Cambridge, he was engaged in fierce arguments with the authorities—as well as many of his colleagues. Soon after the move to Silver Street, Hoyle set up his own institute in Cambridge but still used the brains and help of many at the DAMTP.

During the arguments and upheavals at Cambridge, Hoyle was very much involved with the steady-state theory of the Universe. He had developed the idea with the mathematician Hermann Bondi at King's College, London, and the astronomer Thomas Gold, but at the time it was simply the more scientifically evolved of two contending theories. He detested the alternative theory of a spontaneous creation of the Universe, which he once described as a party girl jumping out of a birthday cake—it just wasn't dignified or elegant. Much to his later amusement, he became the creator of the term “Big Bang,” a phrase coined deliberately to ridicule the idea and dropped into a radio program in which he was propounding his own steady-state theory.

As well as developing his theory of the origin of the Universe, Hoyle acted as supervisor to a select group of students. One of his charges was a graduate student named Jayant Narlikar. Narlikar had been assigned the task of working through some of the mathematics for Hoyle's theory as part of the research material for his Ph.D. He also happened to occupy the office next to Hawking's. Hawking became very interested in Narlikar's equations. Without too much persuasion, Narlikar shared the research material he was working on, and Hawking began to develop the theories further. During the next few months, Hawking spent more and more time walking between his friend's office and his own, clutching pages full of mathematical interpretations in one hand and leaning heavily on his newly acquired walking stick with the other.

At this point it should be emphasized that Hawking had no malicious intent toward Hoyle or, indeed, Narlikar. He was
quite simply curious about the material and was floundering with his own projects. The equations and their meaning were fascinating and perhaps initially more stimulating than his own research. Besides which, the whole approach within the department was one of shared goals and ideals.

Before too long, things came to a head. Hoyle decided to make a public announcement of his findings at a meeting of the Royal Society in London. Although it was certainly not without precedent, some of his colleagues considered that he was being overly keen in doing this, because this announcement was about work that had not been refereed. Hoyle gave his talk to around a hundred people; at the end there was warm applause and the usual post-lecture hubbub of conversation. Then he asked if there were any questions. Naturally, Hawking had attended and had followed the arguments closely. He stood up slowly, clutching his stick. The room fell silent.

“The quantity you're talking about diverges,” he said.

Subdued murmurs passed around the audience. The gathered scientists saw immediately that, if Hawking's assertion were correct, Hoyle's latest offering would be shown to be false.