Stephen Hawking (15 page)

Hawking's great personal gift is to be able to make light of his disabilities and always to have a cheerful and positive outlook on life. He simply refuses to let his condition get him down. In physics he has a perfect displacement activity. By keeping himself totally preoccupied with the nature and origin of the cosmos and playing what he calls the “game of Universe,” he does not allow himself to spend time and energy thinking about his state of health. Once, when asked whether he ever became depressed over his condition, he replied, “Not normally. I have managed to do what I wanted to do despite it, and that gives a feeling of achievement.”
⁵
Despite the gradual deterioration in his speech and increasing muscular atrophy, to his close friends he was the same Stephen Hawking they had known since his early Cambridge days, and those who really understood him felt the warmth of his personality.

Both Jane and Stephen knew that they should not waste any time in starting a family once they were married, and their first child, a boy they named Robert, was born in 1967.

This event was another turning point in Hawking's life. Only four years after he was diagnosed as having a terminal illness and a life expectancy of two years, his reputation as a physicist was in the ascendant; he had retained, by sheer determination and willpower, a degree of independence and mobility; and now, against all odds, he was a father. As Jane has observed, “It obviously gave Stephen a great new impetus, being responsible for this tiny creature.”
⁶

Everything seemed to be going well for him. His career was blossoming; and with every new paper he published, a further barrier in our understanding of the Universe was broken down. His reputation as a promising new name in the world of physics was reinforced with each fresh breakthrough. And now he had a son to add to the happiness of his married life.

For Jane these events were not quite so elevating. To her fell the burden of raising a child, keeping the home together, and caring for a severely disabled husband who could do nothing to help her. She is quoted as saying:

When I married him I knew there was not going to be the possibility of my having a career, that our household could only accommodate one career and that had to be Stephen's. Nevertheless, I have to say I found it very difficult and very frustrating in those early years. I felt myself very much the household drudge, and Stephen was getting all the glittering prizes.
⁷

On another occasion, she said:

I can imagine how frustrating it must be for some physicists' wives when they expect help from able-bodied husbands that is not forthcoming. I have no illusions on that score, so it doesn't trouble me unduly.
⁸

It would be many years before the inevitable tensions that were brewing would break to the surface.

The couple decided to buy the house in Little St. Mary's Lane. Hawking swallowed his pride and returned to the
Bursary at Caius to ask the college for a mortgage. The Bursary conducted a survey of the property, decided that it would not be a sound investment, and turned him down. Once again, his status as a fellow was opening up very few “real life” privileges. Undeterred, they went to a building society for the loan and were granted a mortgage. Stephen's parents gave them the money to do up the house, and the usual gang of friends once more helped out, this time with wallpapering and painting.

Although the house was small, they remained there for a number of years until, in the mid-seventies, it became too cramped for the growing family. But in the meantime it served their purposes as well as it had ever done. Newly decorated, it was even cozier than it had been as a rented property, and—what was more important—it was now their own home, providing a secure environment in which they could begin to raise a family.

The sixties were a great time to be alive and young. They were a time of tremendous, although in some ways misplaced, hope, an era of reawakening two decades after the end of the Second World War and all the privations that followed, a time of fresh beginnings and optimism in all spheres of life. The second half of the decade heralded the first real counter-cultural revolution in the West, bringing with it new music, new art, and new literature. A few years earlier, the trial surrounding the censorship of D. H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
had seen the dam of elitism and Victorian morality burst wide
open with the immortal question, “Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servant to read?” The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and, so it seemed, half the youth of Britain and America were experimenting with psychedelic drugs; dresses were getting shorter and hair longer.

The Hawkings and their friends in Cambridge showed little interest in fashion and pop music, although Jane was keen on mini-dresses and the latest hairstyles. But in the world of science, things were also on the move. George Ellis clearly remembers watching the maiden flight of the Concorde in April 1969 and being filled with excitement at the new technology taking the world by storm. Then, only a few months later, they sat glued to their TV screens to watch the “one small step” of Neil Armstrong when the lunar module
Eagle
landed in the Sea of Tranquility, 240,000 miles away on the surface of the Moon. “The
Eagle
has landed,” he said. “The surface is like a fine powder. It has a soft beauty all its own, like some desert in the United States.” At that moment, anything seemed possible.

The Hawkings and the Ellises went on holiday together in 1969. Foreign holidays were suddenly in vogue because of drastically reduced prices, and it had become very fashionable to take a package trip to such destinations as Spain or its outlying islands, especially Majorca. The two families flew to Palma airport, Majorca, and spent a short break walking through the unspoiled almond groves, sampling the local wine, and sunning themselves on the clean, unmolested beaches, almost untouched by visiting Anglo-Saxons and certainly lager-lout-free.

Hawking was working harder than he had ever worked before, and it was paying dividends. In 1966 he won the Adams Prize for an essay entitled “Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime.” Much of his research during this period was a continuation of the work that had yielded the astonishing last chapter of his Ph.D. thesis. He spent most of this time in collaboration with Roger Penrose, who was by then professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in London.

One of the major difficulties the two of them faced was that they had to devise new mathematical techniques in order to carry out the calculations necessary to verify their theories—to make them empirically sound and not just ideas. Einstein had experienced a similar problem fifty years earlier with the mathematics of general relativity. He, like Hawking, was not a particularly brilliant mathematician. Fortunately for Hawking, however, Penrose was. In fact, he was fundamentally a mathematician rather than a physicist, but at the deep level at which the two subjects become almost indistinguishable.

It really boils down to a difference in approach. Hawking's way of working is largely intuitive—he just knows if an idea is correct or not. He has an amazing feel for the subject, a bit like a musician playing by ear. Penrose thinks and works in a different way, more like a concert pianist following a musical score. The two approaches meshed perfectly and soon began to produce some very interesting results on the nature of the early Universe. As Dennis Sciama once put it, “[The theories] required very highbrow methods, at least by the standards of theoretical physicists.”
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Penrose liked to work in a highly visual way, using diagrams and pictures, which suited Hawking fine. He always felt more at home with visual
representations than with mathematical formulas. It was also so much easier for him to manipulate these pictures rather than trying to work with equations that he could not write out and had to retain in his head.

Since his undergraduate days, Hawking has been a keen follower of the philosopher Karl Popper. The main thrust of Popper's philosophy of science is that the traditional approach to the subject, “the scientific method” as originally espoused by the likes of Newton and Galileo, is in fact inadequate.

The traditional approach to science can be broken down into six stages. First comes an observation or an experiment. Scientists then try to devise a general theory to explain by induction what they have observed, and then they go on to propose a hypothesis based on this general theory. Next come attempts to verify this hypothesis by further experimentation. The original theory is thus proved or disproved, and the scientist then assumes the truth or otherwise of the matter until proven wrong.

Popper stands this process on its head and suggests the following approach. Take a problem. Propose a solution or a theory to explain what is happening. Work out what testable propositions you can deduce from your theory. Carry out tests or experiments on these deductions in order not to prove them but to refute them. The refutations, combined with the original theory, will yield a better one.

The primary difference between the two approaches is that, according to the traditional scientific method, after making an observation the scientist attempts to verify a theory by further experiment; in Popper's system, the scientist tries to disprove the theory in an attempt to find a better one. It is this aspect of
Popper's thought that is so appealing to Hawking and many other scientists, and he has often applied it in his own scientific work. The science writer Dennis Overbye once asked him how his mind worked. In reply, Hawking said:

Sometimes I make a conjecture and then try to prove it. Many times, in trying to prove it, I find a counter-example, then I have to change my conjecture. Sometimes it is something that other people have made attempts on. I find that many papers are obscure and I simply don't understand them. So, I have to try to translate them into my own way of thinking. Many times I have an idea and start working on a paper and then I will realize halfway through that there's a lot more to it.

I work very much on intuition, thinking that, well, a certain idea ought to be right. Then I try to prove it. Sometimes I find I'm wrong. Sometimes I find that the original idea was wrong, but that leads to new ideas. I find it a great help to discuss my ideas with other people. Even if they don't contribute anything, just having to explain it to someone else helps me sort it out for myself.
¹⁰

Little did he know, at the end of the 1960s, just how important his ideas would soon prove to be.

^*
Pronounced “keys”; its full name is Gonville and Caius College.

7

SINGULAR SOLUTIONS

D
uring the 1960s, four new developments, two concerning black holes and two cosmological, led to a revival of interest in the singular solutions to Einstein's equations. As a result of the work stimulated by these developments, especially the collaboration between Hawking and Roger Penrose, physicists realized at the beginning of the 1970s that they might have to come to terms with the unthinkable: the prediction from the general theory of relativity that points of infinite density—singularities—
could
exist in the Universe did not, after all, indicate a flaw in those equations,
and singularities might
really
exist. Even worse, for those still trying to cling to an older picture of reality, because the Universe itself seems to be a black hole viewed from within the Schwarzschild horizon, there might indeed be a singularity at the beginning of time that could
not
be obscured from our view—a “naked” singularity.