Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work

by Kitty Ferguson

  In St Albans the Hawkings were regarded as a highly intelligent, eccentric family. Their love of books extended to such compulsive reading habits that Stephen’s friends found it odd and a little rude of his family to sit at the dining table, uncommunicative, their noses buried in their books. Reports that the family car was a used hearse are false. For many years the Hawkings drove around in a succession of used London taxis of the black, boxlike sort. This set them apart not only because of the nature of the vehicle, but also because after the war cars of any kind were not easily available. Only families who were fairly wealthy had them at all. Frank Hawking installed a table in the back of the taxi, between the usual bench seat and the fold-down seats, so that Stephen and his siblings could play cards and games. The car and the game table were put to especially good use getting to their usual holiday location, a painted gypsy caravan and an enormous army tent set up in a field at Osmington Mills, in Dorset. The Hawking campsite was only a hundred yards from the beach. It was a rocky beach, not sand, but it was an interesting part of the coast – smuggler territory in a past age.

  In the post-war years it was not unusual for families to live frugally with few luxuries, unable to afford home repairs, and, out of generosity or financial constraint, house more than two generations under one roof. But the Hawkings, though their house in St Albans was larger than many British homes, carried frugality and disrepair to an extreme. In this three-storey, strangely put together redbrick dwelling, Frank kept bees in the cellar, and Stephen’s Scottish grandmother lived in the attic, emerging regularly to play the piano spectacularly well for local folk dances. The house was in dire need of work when the Hawkings moved in, and it stayed that way. According to Stephen’s adopted younger brother Edward, ‘It was a very large, dark house … really rather spooky, rather like a nightmare.’9 The leaded stained glass at the front door must originally have been beautiful but was missing pieces. The front hall was lit only by a single bulb and its fine authentic William Morris wall covering had darkened. A greenhouse behind the rotting porch lost panes whenever there was a wind. There was no central heating, the carpeting was sparse, broken windows were not replaced. The books, packed two deep on shelves all over the house, added a modicum of insulation. Frank Hawking would brook no complaints. One had only to put on more clothes in winter, he insisted. Frank himself was often away on research trips to Africa during the coldest months. Stephen’s sister Mary recalls thinking that fathers were ‘like migratory birds. They were there for Christmas and then they vanished until the weather got warm.’10 She thought that fathers of her friends who didn’t disappear were ‘a bit odd’.11

  The house lent itself to imaginative escapades. Stephen and Mary competed in finding ways to get in, some of them so secret that Mary was never able to discover more than ten of the eleven that Stephen managed to use. As if one such house were not enough, Stephen had another imaginary one in an imaginary place he called Drane. It seemed he did not know where this was, only that it existed. His mother became a little frantic, so determined was he to take a bus to find it, but later, when they visited Kenwood House in Hampstead Heath, she heard him declare that this was it, the house he had seen in a dream.12

  ‘Hawkingese’ was the name Stephen’s friends gave the Hawking ‘family dialect’. Frank Hawking himself had a stutter and Stephen and his siblings spoke so rapidly at home that they also stumbled over their words and invented their own oral shorthand.13 That did not prevent Stephen from being, according to his mother, ‘always extremely conversational’. He was also ‘very imaginative … loved music and acting in plays’, also ‘rather lazy’ but ‘a self-educator from the start … like a bit of blotting paper, soaking it all up’.14 Part of the reason for his lack of distinction in school was that he could not be bothered with things he already knew or decided he had no need to know.

  Stephen had a rather commanding nature in spite of being smaller than most of his classmates. He was well-organized and capable of getting other people organized. He was also known as something of a comedian. Getting knocked around by larger boys didn’t bother him much, but he had his limits, and he could, when driven to it, turn rather fierce and daunting. His friend Simon Humphrey had a heftier build than Stephen, but Simon’s mother recalled that it was Stephen, not Simon, who on one memorable occasion swung around with his fists clenched to confront the much larger bullies who were teasing them. ‘That’s the sort of thing he did – he was equal to anything.’15

  The eight-year-old Stephen’s first school in St Albans was the High School for Girls, curiously named since its students included young children well below ‘high school’ age, and its Michael House admitted boys. A seven-year-old named Jane Wilde, in a class somewhat younger than Stephen’s, noticed the boy with ‘floppy-golden-brown hair’ as he sat ‘by the wall in the next-door classroom’,16 but she didn’t meet him. She would later become his wife.

  Stephen attended that school for only a few months, until Frank needed to stay in Africa longer than usual and Isobel accepted an invitation to take the children for four months to Majorca, off the east coast of Spain. Balmy, beautiful Majorca, the home of Isobel’s friend from her Oxford days, Beryl, and Beryl’s husband, the poet Robert Graves, was an enchanting place to spend the winter. Education was not entirely neglected for there was a tutor for Stephen and the Graveses’ son William.17

  Back in St Albans after this idyllic hiatus, Stephen went for one year to Radlett, a private school, and then did well enough in his tests to qualify for a place at the more selective St Albans School, also a private school, in the shadow of the Cathedral. Though in his first year at St Albans he managed to rank no better than an astonishing third from the bottom of his class, his teachers were beginning to perceive that he was more intelligent than he was demonstrating in the classroom. His friends dubbed him ‘Einstein’, either because he seemed more intelligent than they or because they thought he was eccentric. Probably both. His friend Michael Church remembers that he had a sort of ‘overarching arrogance … some overarching sense of what the world was about’.18

  ‘Einstein’ soon rose in ranking to about the middle of the class. He even won the Divinity prize one year. From Stephen’s earliest childhood, his father had read him stories from the Bible. ‘He was quite well versed in religious things,’ Isobel later told an interviewer.19 The family often enjoyed having theological debates, arguing quite happily for and against the existence of God.

  Undeterred by a low class placing, ever since the age of eight or nine Stephen had been thinking more and more seriously about becoming a scientist. He was addicted to questioning how things worked and trying to find out. It seemed to him that in science he could find out the truth, not only about clocks and radios but also about everything else around him. His parents planned that at thirteen he would go to Westminster School. Frank Hawking thought his own advancement had suffered because of his parents’ poverty and the fact that he had not attended a prestigious school. Others with less ability but higher social standing had got ahead of him, or so he felt. Stephen was to have something better.

  The Hawkings could not afford Westminster unless Stephen won a scholarship. Unfortunately, he was prone at this age to recurring bouts of a low fever, diagnosed as glandular fever, that sometimes was serious enough to keep him home from school in bed. As bad luck would have it, he was ill at the time of the scholarship examination. Frank’s hopes were dashed and Stephen continued at St Albans School, but he believes his education there was at least as good as the one he would have received at Westminster.

  After the Hawkings adopted Edward in 1955, Stephen was no longer the only male sibling. Stephen accepted his new younger brother in good grace. He was, according to Stephen, ‘probably good for us. He was a rather difficult child, but one couldn’t help liking him.’20

  Continuing at St Albans School rather than heading off to Westminster had one distinct advantage. It meant being able to continue growing up in a little band of close fr
iends who shared with Stephen such interests as the hazardous manufacture of fireworks in the dilapidated greenhouse and inventing board games of astounding complexity, and who relished long discussions on a wide range of subjects. Their game ‘Risk’ involved railways, factories, manufacturing, and its own stock exchange, and took days of concentrated play to finish. A feudal game had dynasties and elaborate family trees. According to Michael Church, there was something that particularly intrigued Stephen about conjuring up these worlds and setting down the laws that governed them.21 John McClenahan’s father had a workshop where he allowed John and Stephen to construct model aeroplanes and boats, and Stephen later remarked that he liked ‘to build working models that I could control … Since I began my Ph.D., this need has been met by my research into cosmology. If you understand how the universe operates, you control it in a way.’22 In a sense, Hawking’s grown-up models of the universe stand in relation to the ‘real’ universe in the same way his childhood model aeroplanes and boats stood in relation to real aeroplanes and boats. They give an agreeable, comforting feeling of control while, in actuality, representing no control at all.

  Stephen was fifteen when he learned that the universe was expanding. This shook him. ‘I was sure there must be some mistake,’ he says. ‘A static universe seemed so much more natural. It could have existed and could continue to exist for ever. But an expanding universe would change with time. If it continued to expand, it would become virtually empty.’23 That was disturbing.

  Like many other teenagers of their generation, Stephen and his friends became fascinated with extrasensory perception (ESP). They tried to dictate the throw of dice with their minds. However, Stephen’s interest turned to disgust when he attended a lecture by someone who had investigated famous ESP studies at Duke University in the United States. The lecturer told his audience that whenever the experiments got results, the experimental techniques were faulty, and whenever the experimental techniques were not faulty, they got no results. Stephen concluded that ESP was a fraud. His scepticism about claims for psychic phenomena has not changed. To his way of thinking, people who believe such claims are stalled at the level where he was at the age of fifteen.

  Ancestor of ‘Cosmos’

  Probably the best of all the little group’s adventures and achievements – and one that captured the attention and admiration of the entire town of St Albans – was building a computer that they called LUCE (Logical Uniselector Computing Engine). Cobbled together out of recycled pieces of clocks and other mechanical and electrical items, including an old telephone switchboard, LUCE could perform simple mathematical functions. Unfortunately that teenage masterpiece no longer exists. Whatever remained of it was thrown away eventually when a new head of computing at St Albans went on a cleaning spree.24

  The most advanced version of LUCE was the product of Stephen’s and his friends’ final years of school before university. They were having to make hard choices about the future. Frank Hawking encouraged his son to follow him into medicine. Stephen’s sister Mary would do that, but Stephen found biology too imprecise to suit him. Biologists, he thought, observed and described things but didn’t explain them on a fundamental level. Biology also involved detailed drawings, and he wasn’t good at drawing. He wanted a subject in which he could look for exact answers and get to the root of things. If he’d known about molecular biology, his career might have been very different. At fourteen, particularly inspired by a teacher named Mr Tahta, he had decided that what he wanted to do was ‘mathematics, more mathematics, and physics’.

  Stephen’s father insisted this was impractical. What jobs were there for mathematicians other than teaching? Moreover he wanted Stephen to attend his own college, University College, Oxford, and at ‘Univ’ one could not read mathematics. Stephen followed his father’s advice and began boning up on chemistry, physics and only a little maths, in preparation for entrance to Oxford. He would apply to Univ to study mainly physics and chemistry.

  In 1959, during Stephen’s last year before leaving home for university, his mother Isobel and the three younger children accompanied Frank when he journeyed to India for an unusually lengthy research project. Stephen stayed in St Albans and lived for the year with the family of his friend Simon Humphrey. He continued to spend a great deal of time improving LUCE, though Dr Humphrey interrupted regularly to insist he write letters to his family – something Stephen on his own would have happily neglected. But the main task of that year had to be studying for scholarship examinations coming up in March. It was essential that Stephen perform extremely well in these examinations if there was to be even an outside chance of Oxford’s accepting him.

  Students who rank no higher than halfway up in their school class seldom get into Oxford unless someone pulls strings behind the scenes. Stephen’s lacklustre performance in school gave Frank Hawking plenty of cause to think he had better begin pulling strings. Stephen’s headmaster at St Albans also had his doubts about Stephen’s chances of acceptance and a scholarship, and he suggested Stephen might wait another year. He was young to be applying to university. The two other boys planning to take the exams with him were a year older. However, both headmaster and father had underestimated Stephen’s intelligence and knowledge, and his capacity to rise to a challenge. He achieved nearly perfect marks in the physics section of the entrance examinations. His interview at Oxford with the Master of University College and the physics tutor, Dr Robert Berman, went so well there was no question but that he would be accepted to read physics and be given a scholarship. A triumphant Stephen joined his family in India for the end of their stay.

  Not a Grey Man

  In October 1959, aged seventeen, Hawking went up to Oxford to enter University College, his father’s college. ‘Univ’ is in the heart of Oxford, on the High Street. Founded in 1249, it is the oldest of the many colleges that together make up the University. Stephen would study natural science, with an emphasis on physics. By this time he had come to consider mathematics not as a subject to be studied for itself but as a tool for doing physics and learning how the universe behaves. He would later regret that he had not exerted more effort mastering that tool.

  Oxford’s architecture, like Cambridge’s, is a magnificent hodge-podge of every style since the Middle Ages. Its intellectual and social traditions predate even its buildings and, like those of any great university, are a mix of authentic intellectual brilliance, pretentious fakery, innocent tomfoolery and true decadence. For a young man interested in any of these, Stephen’s new environment had much to offer. Nevertheless, for about a year and a half, he was lonely and bored. Many students in his year were considerably older than he, not only because he had sat his examinations early but because others had taken time off for national service. He was not inspired to relieve his boredom by exerting himself academically. He had discovered he could get by better than most by doing virtually no studying at all.

  Contrary to their reputation, Oxford tutorials are often not one-to-one but two or three students with one tutor. A young man named Gordon Berry became Hawking’s tutorial partner. They were two of only four physics students who entered Univ that Michaelmas (autumn) term of 1959. This small group of newcomers – Berry, Hawking, Richard Bryan and Derek Powney – spent most of their time together, somewhat isolated from the rest of the College.

  It wasn’t until he was halfway through his second year that Stephen began enjoying Oxford. When Robert Berman describes him, it’s difficult to believe he’s speaking of the same Stephen Hawking who seemed so ordinary a few years earlier and so bored the previous year. ‘[H]e did, I think, positively make an effort to sort of come down to [the other students’] level and you know, be one of the boys. If you didn’t know about his physics and to some extent his mathematical ability, he wouldn’t have told you … He was very popular.’25 Others who remember Stephen in his second and third years at Oxford describe him as lively, buoyant and adaptable. He wore his hair long, was famous for his wit, and liked cla
ssical music and science fiction.

  The attitude among most Oxford students in those days, Hawking remembers, was ‘very antiwork’: ‘You were supposed either to be brilliant without effort, or to accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was regarded as the mark of a grey man, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.’ Stephen’s freewheeling, independent spirit and casual attitude towards his studies fitted right in. In a typical incident one day in a tutorial, after reading a solution he had worked out, he crumpled up the paper disdainfully and propelled it across the room into the wastepaper basket.

  The physics curriculum, at least for someone with Hawking’s abilities, could be navigated successfully without rising above this blasé approach. Hawking described it as ‘ridiculously easy. You could get through without going to any lectures, just by going to one or two tutorials a week. You didn’t need to remember many facts, just a few equations.’26 You could also, it seems, get through without spending very much time doing experiments in the laboratory. Gordon and he found ways to use shortcuts in taking data and fake parts of the experiments. ‘We just didn’t apply ourselves,’ remembers Berry. ‘And Steve was right down there in not applying himself.’27

  Derek Powney tells the story of the four of them receiving an assignment having to do with electricity and magnetism. There were thirteen questions, and their tutor, Dr Berman, told them to finish as many as they could in the week before the next tutorial. At the end of the week Richard Bryan and Derek had managed to solve one and a half of the problems; Gordon only one. Stephen had not yet begun. On the day of the tutorial Stephen missed three morning lectures in order to work on the questions, and his friends thought he was about to get his come-uppance. His bleak announcement when he joined them at noon was that he had been able to solve only ten. At first they thought he was joking, until they realized he had done ten. Derek’s comment was that this was the moment Stephen’s friends recognized ‘that it was not just that we weren’t in the same street, we weren’t on the same planet’.28 ‘Even in Oxford, we must all have been remarkably stupid by his standards.’29