His friends were not the only ones who sometimes found his intelligence impressive. Dr Berman and other dons were also beginning to recognize that Hawking had a brilliant mind, ‘completely different from his contemporaries’. ‘Undergraduate physics was simply not a challenge for him. He did very little work, really, because anything that was do-able he could do. It was only necessary for him to know something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it. Whether he had any books I don’t know, but he didn’t have very many, and he didn’t take notes.’30 ‘I’m not conceited enough to think that I ever taught him anything.’31 Another tutor called him the kind of student who liked finding mistakes in the textbooks better than working out the problems.
The Oxford physics course was scheduled in a way that made it easy not to see much urgent need for work. It was a three-year course with no exams until the end of the third year. Hawking calculates he spent on the average about one hour per day studying: about one thousand hours in three years. ‘I’m not proud of this lack of work,’ he says. ‘I’m just describing my attitude at the time, which I shared with most of my fellow students: an attitude of complete boredom and feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for. One result of my illness has been to change all that: when you are faced with the possibility of an early death, it makes you realize that life is worth living, and that there are lots of things you want to do.’
One major explanation why Stephen’s spirits improved dramatically in the middle of his second year was that he and Gordon Berry joined the college Boat Club. Neither of them was a hefty hunk of the sort who make the best rowers. But both were light, wiry, intelligent and quick, with strong, commanding voices, and these are the attributes that college boat clubs look for when recruiting a coxswain (cox) – the person who sits looking forward, facing the line of four or eight rowers, and steers the boat with handles attached to the rudder. The position of cox is definitely a position of control, something that Hawking has said appealed to him with model boats, aeroplanes and universes – a man of slight build commanding eight muscle-men.
Stephen exerted himself far more on the river, rowing and coxing for Univ, than he did at his studies. One sure way to be part of the ‘in’ crowd at Oxford was to be a member of your college rowing team. If intense boredom and a feeling that nothing was worth making an effort for were the prevailing attitudes elsewhere, all that changed on the river. Rowers, coxes and coaches regularly assembled at the boathouse at dawn, even when there was a crust of ice on the river, to perform arduous calisthenics and lift the racing shell into the water. The merciless practice went on in all weather, up and down the river, coaches bicycling along the towpath exhorting their crews. On race days emotions ran high and crowds of rowdy well-wishers sprinted along the banks of the river to keep up with their college boats. There were foggy race days when boats appeared and vanished like ghosts, and drenching race days when water filled the bottom of the boat. Boat club dinners in formal dress in the college hall lasted late and ended in battles of wine-soaked linen napkins.
All of it added up to a stupendous feeling of physical well-being, camaraderie, all-stops-out effort, and of living college life to the hilt. Stephen became a popular member of the boating crowd. At the level of intercollege competition he did well. He’d never before been good at a sport, and this was an exhilarating change. The College Boatsman of that era, Norman Dix, remembered him as an ‘adventurous type; you never knew quite what he was going to do’.32 Broken oars and damaged boats were not uncommon as Stephen steered tight corners and attempted to take advantage of narrow manoeuvring opportunities that other coxes avoided.
At the end of the third year, however, examinations suddenly loomed larger than any boat race. Hawking almost floundered. He’d settled on theoretical physics as his speciality. That meant a choice between two areas for graduate work: cosmology, the study of the very large; or elementary particles, the study of the very small. Hawking chose cosmology. ‘It just seemed that cosmology was more exciting, because it really did seem to involve the big question: Where did the universe come from?’33 Fred Hoyle, the most distinguished British astronomer of his time, was at Cambridge. Stephen had become particularly enthusiastic about the idea of working with Hoyle when he took a summer course with one of Hoyle’s most outstanding graduate students, Jayant Narlikar. Stephen applied to do Ph.D. research at Cambridge and was accepted with the condition that he get a First from Oxford.
One thousand hours of study was meagre preparation for getting a First. However, an Oxford examination offers a choice from many questions and problems. Stephen was confident he could get through successfully by doing problems in theoretical physics and avoiding any questions that required knowledge of facts. As the examination day approached, his confidence faltered. He decided, as a fail-safe, to take the Civil Service exams and apply for a job with the Ministry of Works.
The night before his Oxford examinations Stephen was too nervous to sleep. The examination went poorly. He was to take the Civil Service exams the next morning, but he overslept and missed them. Now everything hung on his Oxford results.
As Stephen and his friends waited on tenterhooks for their results to be posted, only Gordon was confident he had done well in his examinations – well enough for a First, he believed. Gordon was wrong. He and Derek received Seconds, Richard a disappointing Third. Stephen ended up disastrously on the borderline between a First and a Second.
Faced with a borderline result, the examiners summoned Hawking for a personal interview, a ‘viva’. They questioned him about his plans. In spite of the tenseness of the situation, with his future hanging in the balance, Stephen managed to come up with the kind of remark for which he was famous among his friends: ‘If I get a First, I shall go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I will remain at Oxford. So I expect that you will give me a First.’ He got his First. Dr Berman said of the examiners: ‘They were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far cleverer than most of themselves.’34
That triumph notwithstanding, all was not well. Hawking’s adventures as a cox, his popularity, and his angst about his exams had pushed into the background a problem that he had first begun to notice that year and that refused to go away. ‘I seemed to be getting more clumsy, and I fell over once or twice for no apparent reason,’35 he remembers. The problem had even invaded his halcyon existence on the river when he began to have difficulty sculling (rowing a one-man boat). During his final Oxford term, he tumbled down the stairs and landed on his head. His friends spent several hours helping him overcome a temporary loss of short- and long-term memory, insisted he go to a doctor to make sure no serious damage had been done, and encouraged him to take a Mensa intelligence test to prove to them and to himself that his mind was not affected. All seemed well, but they found it difficult to believe that his fall had been a simple accident.
There was indeed something amiss, though not as a result of his tumble … and not with his mind. That summer, on a trip he and a friend took to Persia (now Iran), he became seriously ill, probably from a tourist stomach problem or a reaction to the vaccines required for the trip.36 It was a harrowing journey in other ways, more harrowing for his family back home than for Stephen. They lost touch with him for three weeks, during which time there was a serious earthquake in the area where he was travelling. Stephen, as it turned out, had been so ill and riding on such a bumpy bus that he didn’t notice the earthquake at all. He finally got back home, depleted and unwell. Later there would be speculation about whether a non-sterile smallpox vaccination prior to the trip had caused his illness in Persia and also his ALS, but the latter had, in fact, begun earlier. Nevertheless, because of his illness in Persia and the increasingly troubling symptoms he was experiencing, Stephen arrived at Cambridge a more unsettled and weaker twenty-year-old than he had been at Oxford the previous spring. He moved into Trinity Hall for the Michaelmas term in the autumn of 1962.
During the sum
mer before Stephen left for Cambridge, Jane Wilde saw him while she was out walking with her friends in St Albans. He was a ‘young man with an awkward gait, his head down, his face shielded from the world under an unruly mass of straight brown hair … immersed in his own thoughts, looking neither right nor left … lolloping along in the opposite direction’.37 Jane’s friend Diana King, sister of Stephen’s friend Basil King, astonished her friends by telling them that she had gone out with him. ‘He’s strange but very clever. He took me to the theatre once. He goes on Ban the Bomb marches.’38
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’
HAWKING’S FIRST YEAR at cambridge was largely a disaster. Fred Hoyle already had his full quota of graduate students and Stephen was assigned Denis Sciama instead. Sciama was a lesser name in physics than Hoyle – in fact, Stephen had never heard of him – but others knew him to be a fine mentor who cared deeply about his students. He also was far more available in Cambridge than Hoyle, who was an international figure and spent much of his time at observatories in other parts of the world. Sciama and Hoyle both favoured the ‘Steady State’ theory of the universe. Hoyle, with Hermann Bondi and Tom Gold, had fathered that theory.
The Steady State theory recognized the expansion of the universe but, unlike the Big Bang theory, did not require the universe to have a beginning in time. The proposal was that as the universe expands, with galaxies moving apart from one another, new matter appears to fill the increasingly large gaps among them, eventually forming new stars and galaxies. At any moment in its history and future, the universe looks pretty much the same as it does at any other time. The Steady State was destined to lose the contest with the Big Bang theory, but for a while it seemed a brilliantly viable competitor.
For someone with Hawking’s slipshod mathematics background, general relativity was rough going, and he soon sorely regretted allowing his father to steer him away from maths at Oxford. Sciama suggested that he might concentrate on astrophysics, but Stephen had firmly set his sights on general relativity and cosmology. Keeping his head barely above water, he undertook a quick, arduous self-education. At King’s College London, Hermann Bondi had started a course in general relativity. Stephen, along with other Cambridge graduate students, travelled there regularly for lectures.
Relativity and cosmology were risky choices even for those sufficiently well prepared in mathematics. The scientific community regarded cosmology with some suspicion and disfavour. As Hawking would later recall, ‘Cosmology used to be considered a pseudoscience and the preserve of physicists who might have done useful work in their earlier years, but who had gone mystic in their dotage.’1 It was highly speculative, with in sufficient observational data to curb or shape speculation.2 Sciama himself, just two years before Hawking met him, wrote that cosmology was ‘a highly controversial subject, which contains little or no agreed body of doctrine’.3
Hawking was aware of these difficulties, but the challenge of working at the frontiers and venturing into unexplored territory was irresistible. Cosmology and general relativity were ‘neglected fields that were ripe for development at that time. Unlike elementary particles, there was a well-defined theory, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, thought to be impossibly difficult. People were so pleased to find any solution to [Einstein’s] field equations; they didn’t ask what physical significance, if any, it had.’4
Einstein’s general theory of relativity was indeed, as Hawking pointed out, a well-defined theory in which gravity is explained as the warping of spacetime, but Sciama had been right about cosmology. The battle still raged about which theory could correctly describe the history of the universe – the Big Bang theory or the Steady State theory. Had the universe had a beginning or not? In the twenty-first century, it seems incredible that when Hawking came up to Cambridge as a graduate student in 1962, that contest had not yet by any means been settled.
Hawking’s failure to get Hoyle as his supervisor and his mathematical deficiencies were setbacks, but no more than typical for a first-year graduate student. While he struggled to catch up on general relativity and find a way through the mathematical maze needed to understand it, a far more unusual and merciless problem was overtaking him in the autumn of 1962, threatening to make all this effort meaningless. The clumsiness he had noticed during his third year at Oxford kept getting worse. That first autumn in Cambridge, he had trouble tying his shoes and sometimes had a problem talking. His speech became slurred, enough so that those who met him for the first time assumed he had a slight speech impediment.
When he went home to St Albans for Christmas after his first term in Cambridge, Stephen’s physical problems were too obvious to conceal from his parents. Frank Hawking took his son to the family doctor. That doctor referred them to a specialist. They made an appointment for after the holidays.
Shortly after his twenty-first birthday in January, Hawking found himself not heading back to Cambridge for the Lent term but in St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London for tests. Perhaps it made the situation a little less daunting that his sister Mary, preparing to follow their father into medicine, was in training at ‘Bart’s’. Stephen refused the private hospital room his parents had wanted for him, because of his ‘socialist principles’. In hospital, specialists took a muscle sample from his arm, stuck electrodes into him, and injected radio-opaque fluid into his spine and watched it going up and down with X-rays while they tilted the bed on which he lay. After two weeks they released him, telling him vaguely that what he had wasn’t a ‘typical case’ and that it wasn’t multiple sclerosis. The doctors suggested he go back to Cambridge and get on with his work. ‘I gathered,’ Hawking remembers, ‘that they expected it to continue to get worse, and that there was nothing they could do, except give me vitamins. I could see that they didn’t expect them to have much effect. I didn’t feel like asking for more details, because they were obviously bad.’
Isobel Hawking did not immediately learn how seriously ill her son was, until, out ice skating with her, he fell and couldn’t get up. Finally off the ice, she bundled him into a café and pressured him to talk about the physical difficulties he was having and what the doctors were saying. She insisted on conferring with his doctor herself, and was given the same devastating news.5
Hawking had contracted a rare disease for which there is no known cure, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), known in Britain as motor neurone disease, in America as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It causes a gradual disintegration of the nerve cells in the spinal cord and brain that regulate voluntary muscle activity. The first symptoms are usually weakness and twitching of the hands, and perhaps slurred speech and difficulty in swallowing. As nerve cells disintegrate, the muscles they control atrophy. Eventually this happens to every voluntary muscle of the body. Movement becomes impossible. Speech and all other means of communication are lost. Though Hawking is not the only patient to have survived for several decades, death almost always occurs within two or three years as a result of pneumonia or suffocation when the respiratory muscles fail. The disease does not affect involuntary muscles of the heart, muscles of waste elimination or the sexual organs, and the brain remains completely lucid to the end. To some this seems an advantage, to others a horror. Patients in the final stages of the disease are often given morphine, not for pain – there is none – but for panic and depression.
For Hawking everything had changed. With typical understatement, he describes his reaction: ‘The realization that I had an incurable disease, that was likely to kill me in a few years, was a bit of a shock. How could something like that happen to me? Why should I be cut off like this? However, while I had been in hospital, I had seen a boy I vaguely knew die of leukaemia in the bed opposite me. It had not been a pretty sight. Clearly there were people who were worse off than I. At least, my condition didn’t make me feel sick. Whenever I feel inclined to be sorry for myself, I remember that boy.’
Nevertheless, at first Hawking went into a deep depression. He didn’t know what he ought to do, what was going to happen to him, how quickly he would get worse, or what it would be like. His doctors had told him to continue his Ph.D. research, but that had already been going poorly. This fact was almost as depressing to him as his illness. It seemed pointless to try to continue working towards a doctorate he wouldn’t live to receive, nothing but a foolish device for keeping his mind preoccupied while his body was dying. He holed up miserably in his college rooms at Trinity Hall, but he insists: ‘Reports in magazine articles that I drank heavily are an exaggeration. I felt somewhat of a tragic character. I took to listening to Wagner.
‘My dreams at that time were rather disturbed,’ he remembers. ‘Before my condition had been diagnosed, I had been very bored with life. There had not seemed to be anything worth doing. But shortly after I came out of hospital, I dreamt that I was going to be executed. I suddenly realized that there were a lot of worthwhile things I could do, if I were reprieved. Another dream that I had several times was that I would sacrifice my life to save others. After all, if I were going to die anyway, it might as well do some good.’
Frank Hawking took advantage of all the connections his stature in the medical profession made available to him. He contacted experts in every possibly related disease, but all was in vain. Hawking’s doctors hoped his condition would stabilize, but the disease progressed rapidly. They soon informed him that he did indeed have only about two years to live. At that point his father appealed to Denis Sciama to help Stephen finish his dissertation early. Sciama, knowing Hawking’s potential and unwilling to let him compromise even if he was dying, turned the request down.
Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work Page 5