Hawking, Stephen (1942- )
English physicist
Stephen Hawking has been called the most insightful theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein. His work concentrates on the puzzling cosmic bodies called black holes and extends to such specialized fields as particle physics, supersymmetry, and quantum gravity. The origin and fate of the universe are a central concern of Hawking's work. Though few people are able to understand the intricacies of these abstruse subjects, Hawking has gained a worldwide following, not only among other scientists, but also among a great many laypeople. As an author and lecturer, he has achieved celebrity status.
Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England. He often refers to the fact that his birth date coincided with the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's death. Hawking was the eldest child of an intellectual and accomplished family. His father, Frank Hawking, was a physician and research biologist who specialized in tropical diseases; his mother, Isobel, the daughter of a Glasgow physician and a well-read, lively woman, was active for many years in Britain's Liberal Party
Stephen Hawking's earliest years were spent in Highgate, a London suburb. In 1950, when he was eight, the family moved to St. Albans, a cathedral town some twenty miles northwest of London. Two years later, his family enrolled him in St. Albans School, a private institution affiliated with the cathedral. As Michael White and John Gribbin describe the young schoolboy in Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, "He was eccentric and awkward, skinny and puny. His school uniform always looked a mess and, according to friends, he jabbered rather than talked clearly, having inherited a slight lisp from his father." Young Hawking's abilities made little impact on his teachers or fellow students. But he already knew he wanted to be a scientist, and by the time he reached his middle teens, he had decided to pursue physics or mathematics.
Gangly and unathletic, Hawking formed close friendships with a small group of other precocious boys at school. Intrigued by subjects that focused on measurable quantities and objective reasoning, Hawking began to show increasing skill at mathematics, and soon he was outdistancing his peers with high grades while spending very little time on homework. In 1958, Hawking and his friends built a primitive computer that actually worked. In the spring of 1959, Hawking won an open scholarship in natural sciences to University College, Oxford—his father's old college—and in October he enrolled there. It was at Oxford that his unusual abilities began to become more obvious. Hawking's ease at handling difficult problems made it seem to others that he didn't need to study. In Stephen Hawking's Universe, John Boslough wrote, "He took an independent and freewheeling approach to studies although his tutor, Dr. Robert Berman, recalls that he and other dons were aware that Hawking had a first-rate mind, completely different from his contemporaries."
In 1962, after receiving a first-class honors degree from Oxford, Hawking set off for Cambridge University to begin studying for a Ph.D. in cosmology. Now he was beginning to deal with some of the themes that would preoccupy him throughout his life. One of these was the poorly understood question of black holes. As scientists were later to realize, a black hole is a cosmic body that by its very nature can never be seen. One type of black hole is thought to be the remnant of a collapsed star, which possesses such intense gravity that nothing can escape from it, not even light. Hawking was also intrigued by "space-time singularities," those phenomena in the physical universe or moments in its history where physics seems to break down. In attempting to understand a black hole and the space-time singularity at its center, Hawking made pioneering studies, using formulas developed more than half a century earlier by Einstein.
Hawking received his Ph.D. in 1965 and obtained a fellowship in theoretical physics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He continued his work on black holes, frequently collaborating with Roger Penrose, a mathematician a decade his senior, who like Hawking was deeply interested in theories of space-time. Though still in his twenties, Hawking was beginning to acquire a reputation, and he would often attend conferences where he shocked people by questioning the findings of eminent scientists much older than himself.
In 1968, Hawking joined the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. He and Penrose began using complex mathematics to apply the laws of thermodynamics to black holes. He continued to travel to America, the Soviet Union, and other countries, and in 1973, he published a highly technical book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, written with G. F. R. Ellis. Not long afterward, Hawking made a startling discovery: whereas virtually all previous thinking assumed that black holes could not emit anything, Hawking theorized that under certain conditions they could emit subatomic particles. These particles became known as Hawking Radiation.
Early in 1974, at the unusually young age of 32, Hawking was named a fellow of the Royal Society. Soon afterward, he spent a year as Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. On returning to England, he continued to work toward a theory of the origin of the universe. In this endeavor, he made progress toward linking the theory of relativity, which deals with gravity, with quantum mechanics, which deals with minuscule events inside the atom. Such a theoretical linkage, long sought by researchers, is called the Grand Unification Theory. In 1978, Hawking received the Albert Einstein Award of the
Stephen Hawking. AP/Wide World. Reproduced by permission.Lewis and Rose Strauss Memorial Fund, the most prestigious award in theoretical physics. The following year he co-edited a book with Werner Israel, called General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey. In 1979, Hawking was named Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge—a position held three centuries earlier by Sir Isaac Newton. In the 1980s, his work was beginning to lead him to question the big bang theory, which most other scientists were accepting as the probable origin of the universe. Hawking now asked whether there really had ever been a beginning to space-time (a big bang), or whether one state of affairs (one universe, to put it loosely) simply gave birth to another without beginning or end. Hawking suggested that new universes might be born frequently through little-understood anomalies in space-time. He also investigated string theory and exploding black holes, and showed mathematically that numerous miniature black holes may have formed early in the history of our universe.
In 1988, Hawking's A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes was published. Intended for a general audience, it leapt onto best-seller lists in both America and Britain and remained there for several years. In that book, Hawking explained in simple language the evolution of his own thinking about the cosmos. Major articles followed in Time, Popular Science, and other magazines; films and television programs featured Hawking. He received honorary degrees from many institutions, including the University of Chicago, Princeton University, and the University of Notre Dame. His numerous awards included the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, in 1975; the Pius XI Gold Medal, in 1975; the Maxwell Medal of the Institute of Physics, in 1976; the Franklin Medal of the Franklin Institute, in 1981; the Gold Medal of the Royal Society, in 1985; the Paul Dirac Medal and Prize, in 1987; and the Britannica Award, in 1989.
In 1965, Hawking married Jane Wilde, and they had two sons and a daughter. The couple separated in 1990. Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, which confines him to a wheelchair and requires him to use a computer and voice synthesizer to speak.
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