Stephen Hawking (48 page)

In the wake of the unprecedented success of
A Brief History of Time
, Hawking continued to write and have his books published. He worked alone on
The Universe in a Nutshell
, but he also collaborated.
The Grand Design
, published in September 2010, was coauthored with fellow physicist Leonard Mlodinow, and, even before it hit the shops, it had stirred up controversy (doubtless encouraged by the publicists behind the book) and was trending on Twitter as a book that “put the boot in” to the very notion of God, offering, through physics
(and in particular M-theory) rather than philosophy, the pseudo-Nietzschean premise that God was very much “dead.”

It helped sales, of course, and although it (in the company of everything else Hawking has had published since 1988) could not begin to approach the level of success of
A Brief History of Time
, it furthered the Hawking name, was serialized in
The Times
, and was for a short time the Number One Bestseller on Amazon, but the book was panned for a variety of reasons. There were those who simply loathe the very idea of a scientist venturing into territory they consider solely the preserve of theologians. A typical remark of this caliber came from the Bishop of Swindon, Dr. Lee Rayfield, who offered the BBC the old chestnut: “Science can never prove the non-existence of God just as it can never prove the existence of God. Faith is a matter that's outside that.”
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However, it was not only the conventionally religious who felt offended by some of Hawking's remarks in the book. No less a figure than Baroness Susan Greenfield, one of the world's most eminent neurologists, former Head of the Royal Institution and Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College, Oxford, compared his remarks to the approach of the Taliban: “Science can often suffer from a certain smugness and complacency. Michael Faraday, one of the greatest scientists, had a wonderful quote. He said: ‘There's nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.' What we need to preserve in science is a curiosity and an open-mindedness rather than a complacency and a sort of arrogance where we attack people who come at the big truths and the big questions, albeit using different strategies.” When asked if she felt uncomfortable about scientists making proclamations about God, she declared: “Yes, I
am. Of course they can make whatever comments they like; but when they assume, rather in a Taliban-like way, that they have all the answers, then I do feel uncomfortable. I think that doesn't necessarily do science a service.”
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But perhaps more annoyingly for Hawking and his co-author,
The Grand Design
was also slammed for its over-familiar tone, and critics accused Hawking and Mlodinow (who had once worked as a consultant for
Star Trek: The Next Generation
) of trivializing science. One reviewer declared: “The air inside this literary biosphere is not especially pleasant to breathe; [
The Grand Design
] is full of ‘yuks' such as: ‘If you think it is hard to get humans to follow traffic laws, imagine convincing an asteroid to move along an ellipse' (Oh, my). This is the sort of book that introduces the legendary physicist Richard Feynman as ‘a colorful character who worked at the California Institute of Technology and played the bongo drums at a strip joint down the road.'”
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Lucy Hawking was almost twenty when her parents' marriage ended, and in many ways she remained the only form of glue that connected Stephen with his ex-wife and children during the decade and a half between 1990 and 2005 (when Hawking's second marriage had, but for the paperwork, ended). When his parents separated, Robert Hawking, the eldest of the three siblings, was already moving into a career in IT that would soon lead him to emigrate to America; and Timothy, the youngest, only eleven in 1990, was perhaps the most profoundly disturbed by it. With the stoicism of each of
her parents and being old enough to rationalize the trauma of a family self-destructing, Lucy remained the closest of the children to her father.

As the terrible split between Stephen and Elaine was at its most intense and claims of abuse were flying around, Lucy was facing her own traumas. She had married Alex Mackenzie Smith in 1998, and they had a son William (born in 1997) who suffers from autism, but by 2004 the marriage had fallen apart. Lucy started to crumble under the pressure. She fell into alcoholism and spent a month at a treatment facility, the Meadows in Arizona, which she endearingly refers to as “the looney bin,” before bouncing back.
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The pain she had faced over these years gave her added impetus to try to reinvigorate her relationship with her father and to build bridges between Stephen and his other children and with his ex-wife.

By 2006, Lucy, a single mother earning a living as a journalist and with two novels behind her (
Jaded
[2004] and
Run For Your Life
[2005]), had conceived of a book for young people that would explain complex ideas in the field in which her father was a world authority. She had the original ideas and a way in which the books should be styled and written; her father had the world-famous name and the technical knowledge; they made a perfect match. A third collaborator, a former Ph.D. student of Hawking's, Christophe Galfard, who could translate the complex science into user-friendly concepts for Lucy, completed the team.

In one respect, history was repeating itself. We have seen how Stephen Hawking conceived of and wrote
A Brief History of Time
because he needed a way to pay for 24-hour nursing care and to finance the education of his children;
now Lucy needed to earn a steady income to support her son. The result is a series of books (four published to date) which each feature the characters George and Annie, who access the Universe through a computer called Cosmos. It covers some cutting-edge physics but is aimed squarely at a young audience. “We want to inspire children's curiosity and fire their imagination,” Lucy says of the books. “I'm the creative writer and obviously he's a very famous theoretical physicist. He has this great enthusiasm for explaining complicated subjects in simple terminology. We brought different skills to the project. I'm not about to start correcting his physics. We did have some disagreements. They were largely when I wanted to do something creatively which would involve bending the rules of physics.”
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January 8, 2012, was a very special date—Stephen Hawking's seventieth birthday. Although the average lifespan for a British male is not far short of eighty, the number “seventy” when applied to age has always had a weighted meaning—the Biblical “three score years and ten”—and yet here was the Director of Research at Cambridge, who at the age of twenty-one had been diagnosed with ALS and given two years to live, still working, still surviving.

A symposium at the university was organized for the big day; but, sadly, Hawking was not well enough to attend. Another bout of pneumonia kept him in Addenbrookes until two days before the event, and he took medical advice to rest at home; but the public symposium went ahead with guest
speakers Astronomer Royal Lord Rees and Hawking's best friend, Professor Kip Thorne. Hawking had of course prepared a speech that he was to deliver to an enthusiastic gathering of scientists, businessmen, and celebrities including Richard Branson and Cambridge University alumna model Lily Cole, and this was played over the sound system.

Entitled “A Brief History of Mine,” it offered him the chance to talk about some aspects of his personal life and to offer inspirational words on the future of physics and man's place in the Universe. “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the Universe exist,” he said. “Our picture of the Universe has changed a great deal in the past 40 years, and I'm happy if I've made a small contribution. The fact that we humans—who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature—have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our Universe is a great triumph.”
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Of course, the milestone of Hawking's seventieth birthday sparked seemingly endless articles in the press, going over the by-now very familiar ground concerning the man's past and health along with the usual hyperbole and exaggeration. “The former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein,” trumpeted the BBC.
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It is certain that there would have been many scientists around the world gnashing their teeth at that statement.

Hawking himself, though, was more interested in keeping his survival to the fore, remarking: “I have been lucky that my condition has progressed more slowly than is often the case.
But it shows that one need not lose hope.” He is of course also aware of the hype and overstatement in the way the press insist upon deifying him. “I'm sure my disability has a bearing on why I'm well known,” he admitted. “People are fascinated by the contrast between my limited physical powers and the vast nature of the Universe I deal with.” Adding modestly: “I'm the archetype of the disabled genius or, should I say, a physically challenged genius, to be politically correct. At least I'm obviously physically challenged. Whether I'm a genius is open to doubt.”
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Hawking expresses the opinion that he is merely “lucky” to have survived so long, but this is actually only part of the picture. Although only around one percent of cases of the illness progress very slowly, serendipity is a minor player in the story of how ALS has run its course with Hawking.

According to Leo Cluskey, an Associate Professor of Neurology and Medical Director of the ALS Center at the University of Pennsylvania, there are several important factors to consider when trying to understand how Stephen Hawking is pretty much a unique case. “One thing that is highlighted by this man's course is that this is an incredibly variable disorder in many ways. Life expectancy,” Professor Cluskey says, “. . . turns on two things: the motor neurons running the diaphragm—the breathing muscles. So the common way people die is of respiratory failure. And the other thing is the deterioration of swallowing muscles, and that can lead to malnutrition and dehydration. If you don't have these two things, you could potentially live for a long time—even though you're getting worse. What's happened to him is just astounding. He's certainly an outlier.”
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Another neurologist, Nigel Leigh, a Professor of Clinical Neurology at King's College, London, concurs: “He is exceptional. I am not aware of anyone else who has survived with [ALS] as long. What is unusual is not only the length of time, but that the disease seems to have burnt out. He appears to be relatively stable. This kind of stabilisation is extremely rare.”
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There is also the fact that Hawking suffers from an early-onset form of ALS, which has made a dramatic contribution to his chances of survival. “Juvenile-onset is diagnosed in the teenage years, and I don't know enough about his course to say. But it's probably something similar to juvenile-onset disorder, which is something that progresses very, very, very slowly,” Professor Cluskey remarks. “I have patients in my clinic who were diagnosed in their teens and are still alive in their 40s, 50s, or 60s. But not having ever examined him or taken a history, it's a little hard for me to say.” In conclusion, when asked what Hawking's case might mean for other ALS sufferers, Professor Cluskey says: “It's just an incredible, incredible example of the variability of the disease—and the hope for patients who have it that they could also live a long life. Unfortunately, it's a small percentage of people for whom that actually happens.”
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Hawking, as we have shown, is invariably sanguine about the reasons for his amazing survival, but it has prompted him to give a lot of thought to the controversial issue of assisted suicide, something about which he understandably has strong sentiments. He has said that he did once try to end his own life. “I briefly tried to commit suicide by not breathing. However, the reflex to breathe was too strong.”
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This was during one of the bleakest times of his life, when he was hospitalized
in Geneva in 1985 and around the same time Jane was given the option of switching off his life support. Managing to state his views on his own death and have another dig at religion, he has remarked: “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
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