Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work

by Kitty Ferguson

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  A Random House Group Company

  www.transworldbooks.co.uk

  STEPHEN HAWKING

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781448110476

  A BANTAM BOOK: 9780857500748

  First published in Great Britain

  in 2011 by Bantam Press

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Bantam edition published 2012

  Copyright © Kitty Ferguson 1991, 2001, 2011

  Illustrations here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here by Patrick Mulrey

  Kitty Ferguson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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  About the Book

  Stephen Hawking is one of the most remarkable figures of our time – a Cambridge genius who has earned international celebrity and become an inspiration to those who have witnessed his triumph over disability. This is Hawking’s life story by Kitty Ferguson, written with help from Hawking himself and his close associates.

  Ferguson’s Stephen Hawking’s Quest for a Theory of Everything was a Sunday Times bestseller in 1992. She has now transformed that short book into a hugely expanded, carefully researched, up-to-the-minute biography giving a rich picture of Hawking’s life – his childhood, the heart-rending beginning of his struggle with motor neurone disease, his ever-increasing international fame, and his long personal battle for survival in pursuit of a scientific understanding of the universe. Throughout, Kitty Ferguson also summarizes and explains the cutting-edge science in which Hawking has been engaged.

  Stephen Hawking is written with the clarity and simplicity for which all Kitty Ferguson’s books have been praised. The result is a captivating account of an extraordinary life and mind.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part I: 1942–1975

  1. ‘The quest for a Theory of Everything’

  2. ‘Our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in’

  3. ‘Equal to anything!’

  4. ‘The realization that I had an incurable disease, that was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock’

  5. ‘The big question was, was there a beginning or not?’

  6. ‘There is a singularity in our past’

  Part II: 1970–1990

  7. ‘These people must think we are used to an astronomical standard of living’

  8. ‘Scientists usually assume there is a unique link between the past and the future, cause and effect. If information is lost, this link does not exist’

  9. ‘The odds against a universe that has produced life like ours are immense’

  10. ‘In all my travels, I have not managed to fall off the edge of the world’

  11. ‘It’s turtles all the way down’

  12. ‘The field of baby universes is in its infancy’

  Part III: 1990–2000

  13. ‘Is the end in sight for theoretical physics?’

  14. ‘Between film roles I enjoy solving physics problems’

  15. ‘I think we have a good chance of avoiding both Armageddon and a new Dark Age’

  16. ‘It seems clear to me’

  Part IV: 2000–2011

  17. ‘An expanding horizon of possibilities’

  18. ‘Grandad has wheels’

  19. ‘I’ve always gone in a somewhat different direction’

  20. ‘My name is Stephen Hawking: physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer’

  Picture Section

  Glossary

  References

  Suggested Further Reading

  Bibliography

  Picture Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Kitty Ferguson

  Copyright

  STEPHEN HAWKING

  HIS LIFE AND WORK

  The Story and Science of One of the Most Extraordinary, Celebrated and Courageous Figures of Our Time

  KITTY FERGUSON

  To my granddaughters Grace and Alice

  Stephen Hawking, a line drawing (ink and emulsion) done in 2010 by Cambridge artist Oliver Wallington.

  Acknowledgements

  I WISH TO THANK STEPHEN HAWKING FOR HIS TIME AND patience in helping me understand his theories, and for putting up with some terribly naïve questions from me.

  I am grateful to my agents, Brie Burkeman and Rita Rosenkranz, and my editors, Sally Gaminara at Transworld Publishers and Luba Ostashevsky at Palgrave Macmillan.

  I am also grateful to the following for their assistance in many ways, including reading and checking over portions of this book and conversing with me about the subjects discussed in it. Some of the people listed below have had no direct involvement. Some are no longer alive. But the extent to which they have helped me, through the years, understand Stephen Hawking and his work and the cience related to it, means it would be unconscionable not to thank them here.

  Sidney Coleman, Judith Croasdell, Paul Davies, Bryce DeWitt, Yale Ferguson, Matthew Fremont, Joan Godwin, Andrei Linde, Sue Masey, Don Page, Malcolm Perry, Brian Pippard, Joanna Sanferrare, Leonard Susskind, Neil Turok, Herman and Tina Vetter, John A. Wheeler and Anna Zytkow.

  Nonetheless, any shortcomings in this book are my full responsibility.

  Kitty Ferguson

  PART I

  1942–1975

  1

  ‘The quest for a Theory of Everything’

  1980

  IN THE CENTRE of Cambridge, England, There are a handful of narrow lanes that seem hardly touched by the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. The houses and buildings represent a mixture of eras, but a step around the corner from the wider thoroughfares into any of these little byways is a step back in time, into a passage leading between old college walls or a village street with a medieval church and churchyard or a malt house. Traffic noises from equally old but busier roads nearby are barely audible. There is near silence, birdsong, voices, footsteps. Scholars and townspeople have walked here for centuries.

  When I wrote my first book about Stephen Hawking in 1990, I began the story in one of those little streets, Free School Lane. It runs off Bene’t Street, beside the church of St Bene’t’s with its eleventh-century bell tower. Around the corner, in the lane, flowers and branches still droop through the iron palings of the churchyard, as they did twenty years ago. Bicycles tethered there belie the antique feel of the place, but a little way along on the right is a wall of black, rough stones with narrow slit windows belonging to the fourteenth-century Old Court of Corpus Christi College, the oldest court in Cambridge. Turn your back to that wall and you will see, high up beside a gothic-style gateway, a plaque that reads, THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY. This ga
teway and the passage beyond are a portal to a more recent era, oddly tucked away in the medieval street.

  There is no hint of the friary that stood on this site in the twelfth century or the gardens that were later planted on its ruins. Instead, bleak, factory-like buildings, almost oppressive enough to be a prison, tower over grey asphalt pavement. The situation improves further into the complex, and in the two decades since I first wrote about it some newer buildings have gone up, but the glass walls of these well-designed modern structures are still condemned to reflect little besides the grimness of their older neighbours.

  For a century, until the University of Cambridge built the ‘New’ Cavendish Labs in 1974, this complex housed one of the most important centres of physics research in the world. Here, ‘J. J.’ Thomson discovered the electron, Ernest Rutherford probed the structure of the atom – and the list goes on and on. When I attended lectures here in the 1990s (for not everything moved to the New Cavendish in 1974), enormous chalk-boards were still in use, hauled noisily up and down with crank-driven chain-pulley systems to make room for the endless strings of equations in a physics lecture.

  The Cockcroft Lecture Room, part of this same site, is a much more up-to-date lecture room. Here, on 29 April 1980, scientists, guests and university dignitaries gathered in steep tiers of seats, facing a two-storey wall of chalk-board and slide screen – still well before the advent of PowerPoint. The occasion was the inaugural lecture of a new Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, 38-year-old mathematician and physicist Stephen William Hawking. He had been named to this illustrious chair the previous autumn.

  The title announced for his lecture was a question: ‘Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?’ Hawking startled his listeners by announcing that he thought it was. He invited them to join him in a sensational escape through time and space on a quest to find the Holy Grail of science: the theory that explains the universe and everything that happens in it – what some were calling the Theory of Everything.

  Watching Stephen Hawking, silent in a wheelchair while one of his students read his lecture for the audience, no one unacquainted with him would have thought he was a promising choice to lead such an adventure. Theoretical physics was for him the great escape from a prison more grim than any suggested by the Old Cavendish Labs. Beginning when he was a graduate student in his early twenties, he had lived with encroaching disability and the promise of an early death. Hawking has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in America as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the New York Yankees’ first baseman, who died of it.fn1 The progress of the disease in Hawking’s case had been slow, but by the time he became Lucasian Professor he could no longer walk, write, feed himself, or raise his head if it tipped forward. His speech was slurred and almost unintelligible except to those who knew him best. For the Lucasian lecture, he had painstakingly dictated his text earlier, so that it could be read by the student. But Hawking certainly was and is no invalid. He is an active mathematician and physicist, whom some were even then calling the most brilliant since Einstein. The Lucasian Professorship is an extremely prestigious position in the University of Cambridge, dating from 1663. The second holder of the chair was Sir Isaac Newton.

  It was typical of Hawking’s iconoclasm to begin this distinguished professorship by predicting the end of his own field. He said he thought there was a good chance the so-called Theory of Everything would be found before the close of the twentieth century, leaving little for theoretical physicists like himself to do.

  Since that lecture, many people have come to think of Stephen Hawking as the standard-bearer of the quest for that theory. However, the candidate he named for Theory of Everything was not one of his own theories but ‘N=8 supergravity’, a theory which many physicists at that time hoped might unify all the particles and the forces of nature. Hawking is quick to point out that his work is only one part of a much larger picture, involving physicists all over the world, and also part of a very old quest. The longing to understand the universe must surely be as ancient as human consciousness. Ever since human beings first began to look at the night skies as well as at the enormous variety of nature around them, and considered their own existence, they’ve been trying to explain all this with myths, religion, and, later, mathematics and science. We may not be much nearer to understanding the complete picture than our remotest ancestors, but most of us like to think, as does Stephen Hawking, that we are.

  Hawking’s life story and his science continue to be full of paradoxes. Things are often not what they seem. Pieces that should fit together refuse to do so. Beginnings may be endings; cruel circumstances can lead to happiness, although fame and success may not; two brilliant and highly successful scientific theories taken together yield nonsense; empty space isn’t empty; black holes aren’t black; the effort to unite everything in a simple explanation reveals, instead, a fragmented picture; and a man whose appearance inspires shock and pity takes us joyfully to where the boundaries of time and space ought to be – but are not.

  Anywhere we look in our universe, we find that reality is astoundingly complex and elusive, sometimes alien, not always easy to take, and often impossible to predict. Beyond our universe there may be an infinite number of others. The close of the twentieth century has come and gone, and no one has discovered the Theory of Everything. Where does that leave Stephen Hawking’s prediction? Can any scientific theory truly explain it all?

  fn1 There has been recent evidence that Gehrig may not have had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but another disease similar to it.

  2

  ‘Our goal is nothing less than a complete description of the universe we live in’

  THE IDEA THAT all the amazing intricacy and variety we experience in the world and the cosmos may come down to something remarkably simple is not new or far-fetched. The sage Pythagoras and his followers in southern Italy in the sixth century BC studied the relationships between lengths of strings on a lyre and the musical pitches these produced, and realized that hidden behind the confusion and complexity of nature there is pattern, order, rationality. In the two and a half millennia since, our forebears have continued to find – often, like the Pythagoreans, to their surprise and awe – that nature is less complicated than it first appears.

  Imagine, if you can, that you are a super-intelligent alien who has absolutely no experience of our universe: is there a set of rules so complete that by studying them you could discover exactly what our universe is like? Suppose someone handed you that rule book. Could it possibly be a short book?

  For decades, many physicists believed that the rule book is not lengthy and contains a set of fairly simple principles, perhaps even just one principle that lies behind everything that has happened, is happening, and ever will happen in our universe. In 1980, Stephen Hawking made the brash claim that we would hold the rule book in our hands by the end of the twentieth century.

  My family used to own a museum facsimile of an ancient board game. Archaeologists digging in the ruins of the city of Ur in Mesopotamia had unearthed an exquisite inlaid board with a few small carved pieces. It was obviously an elaborate game, but no one knew its rules. The makers of the facsimile had tried to deduce them from the design of the board and pieces, but those like ourselves who bought the game were encouraged to make our own decisions and discoveries about how to play it.

  You can think of the universe as something like that: a magnificent, elegant, mysterious game. Certainly there are rules, but the rule book didn’t come with the game. The universe is no beautiful relic like the game found at Ur. Yes, it is old, but the game continues. We and everything we know about (and much we do not) are in the thick of the play. If there is a Theory of Everything, we and everything in the universe must be obeying its principles, even while we try to discover what they are.

  You would expect the complete, unabridged rules for the universe to fill a vast library or supercomputer. There would be rules for how galaxies form and move, for how human bodies work and fail to wo
rk, for how humans relate to one another, for how subatomic particles interact, how water freezes, how plants grow, how dogs bark – intricate rules within rules within rules. How could anyone think this could be reduced to a few principles?

  Richard Feynman, the American physicist and Nobel laureate, gave an excellent example of the way the reduction process happens. There was a time, he pointed out, when we had something we called motion and something else called heat and something else again called sound. ‘But it was soon discovered,’ wrote Feynman:

  after Sir Isaac Newton explained the laws of motion, that some of these apparently different things were aspects of the same thing. For example, the phenomena of sound could be completely understood as the motion of atoms in the air. So sound was no longer considered something in addition to motion. It was also discovered that heat phenomena are easily understandable from the laws of motion. In this way, great globs of physics theory were synthesized into a simplified theory.’1

  Life among the Small Pieces

  All matter as we normally think of it in the universe – you and I, air, ice, stars, gases, microbes, this book – is made up of minuscule building blocks called atoms. Atoms in turn are made up of smaller objects, called particles, and a lot of empty space.

  The most familiar matter particles are the electrons that orbit the nuclei of atoms and the protons and neutrons that are clustered in the nuclei. Protons and neutrons are made up of even tinier particles of matter called ‘quarks’. All matter particles belong to a class of particles called ‘fermions’, named for the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi. They have a system of messages that pass among them, causing them to act and change in various ways. A group of humans might have a message system consisting of four different services: telephone, fax, e-mail and ‘snail mail’. Not all the humans would send and receive messages and influence one another by means of all four message services. You can think of the message system among the fermions as four such message services, called forces. There is another class of particles that carry these messages among the fermions, and sometimes among themselves as well: ‘messenger’ particles, more properly called ‘bosons’. Apparently every particle in the universe is either a fermion or a boson.