Stephen Hawking (47 page)

It was as though Stephen Hawking had passed, through another trial by fire, another terrible trough in his life, and from 2006 one senses that he entered a new stage of personal stability and some light after the intense dark of the first half of the decade. The best example of this is the way in which, freed from an unhappy marriage to Elaine Mason, Stephen was reunited with his family and Jane's husband of almost a decade, Jonathan Hellyer-Jones. It was the right time to start mending fences. In 2006, Hawking received the Royal Society Copley Medal, the world's most prestigious mathematics award (and the equivalent to a Nobel Prize). Jane, Lucy, and Tim were there to escort Stephen and to pose for photographers. Happily, the process of reconciliation and renewing of close ties has continued, so that by the time of writing, Jane could announce that there were plans in the air for the whole family to spend a holiday together.

The march of Stephen Hawking's fame remains relentless. This biography brought his life into focus for many as it was
translated into twenty-five languages, and it seemed that hardly a year has passed without one documentary film or another chronicling the incredible story of the man's life. The press have had an insatiable desire to write about Stephen Hawking ever since he became a public figure with the release of the iconic
A Brief History of Time
in 1988; and, as we have said elsewhere, he loves and courts attention and has a great desire for publicity and acclaim. Celebrities, politicians, or even royals visiting Cambridge call in to meet Hawking. This list includes such diverse characters as Buzz Aldrin, Prince Charles, and the magician David Blaine. Hawking has now appeared on
The Simpsons
four times (so frequently in fact that some viewers have claimed they believe he is actually only a cartoon character made up by the program's creators). More recently, Hollywood luminaries such as Jim Carrey have worked on well-crafted skits with Hawking on American chat shows, and he has appeared several times on the hit comedy
The Big Bang Theory
, in which he has amusing exchanges with one of the lead characters, Sheldon (played by Jim Parsons). Hawking's best line came when he called Sheldon after beating him at chess played over the Internet and said: “What do Sheldon Cooper and a black hole have in common? They both suck!”

Increasingly, Hawking's presence in the media has centered upon his diverse interests, his frequent and often controversial statements on all manner of subjects, his associations with the rich and famous, and his own willingness to have fun, to display a very healthy sense of humor and a degree of self-depreciation. It is a delight to see the young, cocksure, ebullient postgrad of his early Cambridge days occasionally
peeking through in the facial expression of the immobile, increasingly decrepit elder statesman. His eyes still light up with merriment when he finds something funny.

There can be no better example of Hawking's
joie de vivre
than the way he was determined to undertake a zero-gravity flight—something very few physically fit people have experienced. He had dreamed of space travel since childhood, and although traveling through a series of parabolic ascents and descents in a converted Boeing 727 is not quite space travel, for everyone apart from professional astronauts, it remains the closest thing to it (although Hawking and Richard Branson have discussed the possibility of Stephen traveling into space aboard a Virgin Galactic vessel in the not-too-distant future, and he has a complimentary seat booked for the $200,000-per-passenger flight).

The long-awaited adventure began early on the morning of April 26, 2007 at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The company running the program, Zero Gravity Corp., covered the cost (almost $4,000), making Stephen the guest of honor with thirty-five fellow passengers. He was monitored constantly by a team of four doctors and two nurses. The plane traveled through eight separate parabolic maneuvers in which zero gravity is experienced for about 25 seconds during each “plunge.”

For Hawking, the experience must have been incredibly profound. During those eight 25-second free-fall sessions, he would have felt completely released from the shackles of disability, the limitations placed upon his body for most of his life. And if his facial expression caught on camera and seen by millions around the world is anything to go by, he clearly
had a fabulous time. “It was amazing,” he declared after the trip was completed. “The zero-g part was wonderful and the higher-g part was no problem. I could have gone on and on. Space, here I come!”
¹⁰

The co-founder of Zero Gravity Corp., Peter Diamandis, said: “It was an incredible day. He didn't want to come back.” And Lucy Hawking, who also accompanied her father on the trip, described it as “Fantastic. We were all aged about three after the end of it.”
¹¹

Aside from all the fun of this adventure, there were two serious aspects to it. The first was that Hawking wanted to show that such experiences were not just for the young or the physically able-bodied. As he put it: “I want to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit.”
¹²
The other reason was to provide him with an opportunity to proselytize the need for the human race to look to a future in which space travel becomes everyday. “I think the human race does not have a future if it doesn't go into space,” he told the BBC; “I therefore want to encourage public interest in space. A zero-gravity flight is the first step towards space travel.”
¹³

The year 2009 proved to be another in which, for a variety of reasons, Stephen Hawking made worldwide headlines. In his role as a visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), he flew to the States in February for a three-month trip. A succession of important meetings with fellow physicists and an appearance before an audience of several thousand at Arizona State University were included in the itinerary. But almost as soon as he landed in America, he fell ill with a respiratory infection. For several weeks he
soldiered on in his typically stoic way, but by early April his condition had worsened. He was flown back to England and immediately admitted to Addenbrookes Hospital, a place that during the past forty years had become something of a home away from home.

This illness turned out to be very serious indeed and perhaps the most life-threatening since 1985, when a tracheostomy saved his life. The Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) posted grim-sounding news updates on its website, and the newspapers of the world were updating their obituary notices ready for publication. But of course, once again, reports of Hawking's imminent death were greatly exaggerated. By the summer, he was back in America and delivering a lecture titled “Why We Should Go Into Space” before a capacity audience of 4,500 at the convention center of CalTech.

That summer, Hawking received one of the most prestigious awards of his prize-laden life when he was given the Medal of Freedom in Washington. The annual award is granted to those who have made outstanding contributions to culture, science, sport, and the humanities. Invited to the White House to receive the award on August 11, he joined fifteen other recipients including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Billie Jean King, and actor Sidney Poitier. Before the gathering and the press, Barack Obama, at his first Medal of Freedom ceremony, said: “This is a chance for me and for the United States of America to say thank you to some of the finest citizens of this country and of all countries. Excellence is still possible in a moment when cynicism and doubt too often prevail.”
¹⁴
Hawking was clearly flattered and honored
by this award, declaring: “It is a great privilege to be awarded the medal. Especially by President Obama, whom I admire deeply.”
¹⁵

Two months later, there was a quite different ceremonial occasion at which Hawking was the center of attention. After thirty years as the 17th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, he was obliged to resign from the position. His last day as Lucasian Professor, the position first created by Henry Lucas in 1663 and once held by Isaac Newton, was September 30. The reason for this rather dramatic event was rooted in the origins of the chair, which stipulated that the holder must retire at, or before, the age of sixty-seven.

Hawking took the opportunity to make a press announcement in which he made it very clear that he was not retiring. As his successor to the Lucasian Professorship, the eminent string theorist Michael Green, took up the position, Hawking was made Director of Research at Cambridge and was based at the Centre for Mathematical Studies.

“The first thing I would like to say is that I'm not retiring,” he declared. He then went on to comment: “It has been a glorious time to be alive and doing research in theoretical physics. Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the last 40 years, and I am happy I have made a small contribution.” With typical levity and cheekiness, he concluded: “I want to share my excitement and enthusiasm. There's nothing like the Eureka moment of discovering something no one knew before. I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.”
¹⁶

On a more serious note, Hawking made some rather unsubtle hints that he might consider leaving Britain altogether because he believed that the government was putting
funding for science into industrial applications out of proportion to the money diverted into basic research, an axe he had been grinding for some years. As far back as 1995, he had declared publicly: “To demand that research projects should all be industrially relevant is ridiculous. How many of the great discoveries of the past that laid the foundation for our modern technology were made through industrially motivated research? The answer is hardly any.”
¹⁷

Although the sentiment is understandable and it is obvious why, as a theoretical physicist, Hawking should feel so strongly about this, it is not an entirely valid comment. Many discoveries in the past that “. . . have laid the foundations for our modern technology” have indeed come from investment in industrial-research projects. And if the definition is broadened only slightly to encompass the industrial-military complex, then actually the
majority
of advances we take for granted have come from industrial research: plastics, nuclear power, space travel, global communications networks, and the Internet, to name but a few.
¹⁸

This aside, how serious was Hawking being when he implied that he might up sticks and leave Cambridge, where he had lived and worked for almost half a century? There were rumors that he might take up a permanent position in the sunshine of Pasadena as a senior member of the CalTech faculty, and there was also a suggestion that he might move to Canada and the Directorship of the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, an institution he had visited on many occasions and liked. But ultimately, these were nothing more than rumors. Hawking, although clearly passionate about the way science is funded in the UK, was
really just using his fame and universal acclaim as a tool to make a point and to upset the government, of which he was certainly no fan.

If any further proof than his often-acerbic remarks about the British government were required, we need only ask the question: Why is Hawking not Sir Stephen Hawking, or even Lord Hawking? After all, his close contemporary and world-class Cambridge cosmologist Astronomer Royal Martin Rees was knighted in 1992 and made a life peer (with the title Baron Rees of Ludlow) in 2005. As we saw in
Chapter 16
, Hawking had accepted the invitation from the Queen to be made a Companion of Honour (but this is not an honor so politically controlled as a knighthood or other awards on the annual honor list), and the simple truth is that Hawking was indeed sounded out concerning his feelings about a knighthood in the early nineties. He made it clear then that he could not accept such a thing because of his anger over the way the government was funding science.