SOURCE: "The Universe and Dr. Hawking," in New York Times Magazine, January 23, 1983, pp. 16-19, 53-9, 64.

In the essay below, Harwood provides an overview of Hawking's life and works.

The theoretical physicist, although he deals in such arcane, modern concepts as curved time and space, is part of a philosophical and spiritual tradition older than recorded history. He seeks to know not just life as he experiences it but how the hidden parts of the universe work and fit together. Ultimately he hopes to learn if and how and why the universe began and if and how and why it will end.

These questions and the new knowledge to which they lead are so far from our daily round of getting, spending, surviving and reproducing that they demand a special language and symbolism in which to discuss them. That isolates the theoretical physicist from the intellectual mainstream, yet the...