Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work

by Kitty Ferguson

  Two years passed. The progression of the disease slowed. ‘I didn’t die. In fact, although there was a cloud hanging over my future, I found to my surprise that I was enjoying life in the present more than before.’ He had to use a cane, but his condition wasn’t all that bad. Total disability and death, though still a not-too-distant certainty, were postponed. Sciama suggested that since he was going to live a while longer, he ought to finish his thesis. Hawking had his reprieve, a precarious and temporary one, but life was precious and full of worthwhile things.

  In January 1963, just before Hawking entered the hospital for tests, Basil King and his sister Diana had hosted a New Year’s party in St Albans. There, Hawking had met Diana’s friend Jane Wilde,6 who was just finishing at St Albans High School and had been accepted to study languages the next autumn at Westfield College in the University of London. Jane later described Stephen as she caught sight of him at that party – ‘slight of frame, leaning against the wall in a corner with his back to the light, gesticulating with long thin fingers as he spoke – his hair falling across his face over his glasses – and wearing a dusty black-velvet jacket and a red-velvet bow tie.’7 Embroidering somewhat on the story of his viva at Oxford (the oral exam that finally won him his First), he regaled her and a friend of his from Oxford with the story that he had tempted the examiners to give him a First and let him go to Cambridge by giving them the opportunity to send him, like a Trojan horse, into the rival university.8 To Jane this dishevelled graduate student seemed terribly intelligent, eccentric and rather arrogant. But he was interesting, and she liked his self-mocking wit. He said he was studying cosmology. She didn’t know what that meant.

  Stephen and Jane exchanged names and addresses at the party, and a few days later Jane received an invitation to a birthday celebration – his twenty-first – on 8 January. The party was Jane’s first experience of the eccentric Hawking home at 14 Hillside Road, St Albans. Though she recognized most of the family as familiar faces in St Albans, she felt painfully unsophisticated among them and their friends, and she spent most of the evening in a corner near the fire, trying to stay warm in the icy cold house, holding Stephen’s younger brother Edward on her lap. The evening cannot have been a total success for Stephen either. His physical problems were becoming impossible to conceal. He had trouble pouring the drinks.

  About a month later, Jane overheard Diana King and a friend discuss the news that Stephen had been diagnosed with ‘some terrible, paralysing incurable disease … a bit like multiple sclerosis, but it’s not multiple sclerosis and they reckon he’s probably only got a couple of years to live’.9 Diana’s brother Basil had been to visit him in the hospital.

  It came as a surprise when Jane encountered Stephen a week later on the railway platform in St Albans, looking much as he had before but more conventionally dressed and with a neater haircut. They were both waiting for the train to London. On the journey, they sat together and talked. When Jane mentioned that she had been sorry to hear about his hospital stay, Stephen wrinkled his nose and said nothing.10 She dropped the subject. He asked her whether she would like to go to the theatre with him some weekend when he was home from Cambridge. She said she would.

  Their first date was for dinner and the theatre in London. The evening turned out to be so expensive that when they had boarded the bus back towards the railway station, Stephen realized that he had run out of funds. There were no ATMs in those days. After treating this young lady to a truly lavish first date, he had to ask her whether she could pay the bus fare. Rummaging around in her handbag, Jane discovered that her purse was not there, and so began their first adventure together.

  Scuttling off the bus before anyone could ask for their fare, Jane and Stephen returned to the darkened, shut Old Vic theatre and found a way in by the stage door. Jane’s purse was under the seat where it had fallen and all seemed to be turning out well when the lights went out completely. Stephen took her hand, and they groped their way back on to the stage and across it in total darkness, and out of the stage door again, Jane following Stephen’s sure lead ‘with silent admiration’.11

  Stephen was definitely not the pizza-and-a-movie type of man, for his next invitation was to the Trinity Hall May Ball. Dinner and the theatre in London and a Cambridge May Ball were certainly among the most seriously splendid dates a girl might hope for.

  When Stephen arrived in Junefn1 to take Jane to Cambridge, the deterioration of his physical condition shocked her. She wondered whether this ‘slight, frail, limping figure who appeared to use the steering wheel to hoist himself up to see over the dashboard’12 was capable of driving the car to Cambridge. The hazards of the journey, however, stemmed not from Stephen’s disability but from the recklessness and speed of his driving. They arrived with Jane vowing to herself to take the train home rather than repeat this experience.13

  Though Trinity Hall is small compared with other Cambridge colleges like Trinity and St John’s, its May Ball proved to be the magical experience a May Ball at its best should be. The lawns and flower beds, falling away towards the river and the meadows of the Backs beyond, were romantically lit, and everyone in formal attire looked remarkably better than usual. There was music to suit all tastes, in different parts of the college. A string quartet in an elegantly panelled room. A cabaret in the Hall. A jazz band. A Jamaican steel band. Champagne was served from a bathtub, and there was a lavish buffet. The festivities continued until dawn and breakfast, and the next day included a punt on the river. Jane was at first mystified but then impressed by the ability of Hawking’s friends to argue quite nastily with him one minute on some intellectual subject and then, the next, treat him with extraordinary gentleness and care for his weakened physical condition. When it was all over, Stephen, to Jane’s chagrin, would not hear of her taking the train back rather than driving with him. She arrived home so flustered and disgusted with his driving that she got out of the car, left him at the kerb and stalked into the house. At her mother’s insistence she went back to invite him in for tea. In spite of the extravagant date invitations, this was no romance yet, though Hawking thought she was ‘a very nice girl’,14 and it was at about this time that Derek Powney became puzzled about his old friend’s sudden interest in John Donne’s elegies, some of the most beautiful and explicit love poems ever written.15

  After seeing Stephen on a few more occasions with his family and hers, Jane set off for a summer in Spain, a requirement for her language degree from Westfield College. When she returned, Stephen had departed for Cambridge again, and Jane soon left St Albans herself to live in London and begin her studies. It wasn’t until November that she heard from him. He was coming to London for a dental appointment and invited her to go with him to the Wallace Collection (a famous display of art, furniture, porcelain, arms and armour), to dinner and to Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman. On this date, Stephen stumbled and fell in the middle of Lower Regent Street. Jane dragged him to his feet. She noticed that as his walking became increasingly unsteady, his opinions became stronger and more defiant. On this occasion, not long after the assassination of US President Kennedy, he expressed disapproval of Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis.16

  That winter, Stephen came frequently to London for seminars and dental appointments and seemed to have a steady supply of opera tickets. Jane also travelled often to Cambridge to see him at the weekends. By this time she was definitely ‘in love with Stephen, with his wicked sense of humour. The light in his eyes was magnetic’,17 but she refused to have a short-term affair with him. Short term was unfortunately all he could foresee, and their weekends were not happy. Jane returned to London many times in tears.

  One problem was that, voluble as Stephen could be on most matters, he was not willing to discuss his illness or share his feelings about it. Though this troubled Jane at the time, she didn’t put pressure on him. It was only later that she realized they had set a precedent of non-communication that would serve them ill in the future.18 One day i
n late winter she met him after he had an appointment with his Harley Street consultant. When she asked him how it had gone, ‘he grimaced’ and told her the doctor had told him ‘not to bother to come back, because there’s nothing he can do’.19 End of conversation.

  Jane’s first year at Westfield was a period of spiritual questioning. It would not have been difficult to be won over to agnosticism or even atheism by this charismatic, intellectually brilliant young man, beside whom she still felt a little like an awkward teenager. But Jane stuck with the faith in God ingrained in her from childhood by her mother and also to the belief that good can come out of any disaster. She concluded that she would have to ‘maintain sufficient faith for the two of us if any good were to come of our sad plight’.20 Stephen, though he never shared her faith, admired her energy and her optimism and gradually began to find them contagious.

  Not everything was an upward curve. In spite of their closeness in the winter, when Jane spent a term in Spain that spring of 1964, her letters to Stephen went unanswered. During a short interval in St Albans before she departed again to spend the summer touring Europe with her family, Jane found Stephen depressed and cynical, playing Wagner at high volume, not bothering, for a change, to hide his sense of futility and frustration, and seemingly determined to do all he could to alienate her. As she would later tell an interviewer, ‘he was really in quite a pathetic state. I think he’d lost the will to live. He was very confused.’21 They were apart for most of the summer. Stephen went with his sister Philippa to Bayreuth for Wagner’s Ring cycle and, from there, on a journey behind the Iron Curtain to Prague.

  Near the end of her family’s European travels, Jane found a postcard from Stephen waiting for her at their hotel in Venice. It was marvel enough that there should be one at all, but it was cheerful and informative. The picture was of the castle-fortress that towers over Salzburg, in Austria, and Stephen’s message exclaimed about the Salzburg Festival, Bayreuth and Prague. Clutching that postcard, Jane explored Venice in a romantic haze, hardly able to contain her eagerness to get back to England and Stephen.

  When Jane got home to St Albans, she found Stephen in much better spirits than he had been earlier in the summer, in spite of having knocked out his front teeth in a fall while travelling on a train in Germany – a sad shame after all that dental work that had brought him to London. His physical condition appeared to have stabilized. He was daring to look ahead.

  On a wet Cambridge autumn evening at the beginning of the Michaelmas term, Stephen proposed marriage and Jane agreed. ‘I wanted to find some purpose to my existence,’ she says, ‘and I suppose I found it in the idea of looking after him. But we were in love, we got married, there didn’t seem much choice in the matter. I just decided what I was going to do, and I did it.’22 They had come to realize, ‘that together we could make something worthwhile of our lives’.23

  For Stephen the engagement made ‘all the difference’. ‘The engagement changed my life. It gave me something to live for. It made me determined to live. Without the help that Jane has given I would not have been able to carry on, nor have had the will to do so.’

  Jane’s father gave his consent to the marriage on the condition that she complete her college education and that unreasonable demands not be placed on her. Frank Hawking suggested that because of his son’s brief life expectancy they have children as soon as possible. As a medical man, he assured her that Stephen’s condition was not hereditary.24

  One obstacle to their marriage had to be dealt with immediately. Westfield College did not permit its undergraduates to marry. An exception was made on the grounds that Jane’s betrothed husband might not live until their wedding date if it were postponed. Jane was, however, required to move out of the college into private accommodation in London. There she would spend her week days, returning to Cambridge and Stephen at weekends.25 Stephen also had to move out of college housing and find new lodgings.

  Hawking’s natural buoyancy returned. He found an ingenious way of phoning London for only the cost of a local Cambridge call, and in long telephone conversations ‘illness assumed the proportions of a minor background irritant as we talked about job prospects, housing, wedding arrangements, and our first trip to the United States … due to start just ten days after the wedding’.26 Hawking was at last making progress with his studies. He decided to count himself supremely lucky that his illness would never touch his mind, no matter how it might paralyse his body. Work in theoretical physics was going to take place almost entirely in his mind. It was one of the few careers he might have chosen in which physical disability wouldn’t be a serious handicap.

  This attitude sounds courageous, but it embarrasses Stephen Hawking to hear himself described that way. It would have been courageous and required tremendous willpower, he thinks, to have chosen such a difficult course deliberately, but that wasn’t how it happened. He simply did the only thing possible. As he puts it, ‘One has to be grown up enough to realize that life is not fair. You just have to do the best you can in the situation you are in.’27 It was true in 1964, and still is today, that, as far as he is concerned, the less made of his physical problems the better. If this book were to talk about his scientific work and fail entirely to mention that doing such work possibly represents more of an achievement for him than it would for most people, that would suit him fine. One of the most important things you can learn about him is how unimportant his disability is. It isn’t accurate to call him a sick man. Health involves much more than physical condition, and in this broader sense for most of his life he’s been one of the healthiest persons around. That message comes through loud and clear in his writing and in most of the things written about him, and it is even more apparent when you’re with him. That’s the Hawking image, and though we should take seriously his warning ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read’, it isn’t a fake image.

  Meanwhile, no marriage was possible until he had a job, and no job was possible without a Ph.D. He began looking for an idea with which to complete his thesis.

  Challenging the Future

  Though Hawking’s life had been in turmoil since the diagnosis in the winter of 1963, neither his deteriorating physical condition nor his growing preoccupation with Jane Wilde had eclipsed his interest in cosmology. His office in the Department of Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics was next door to Jayant Narlikar, whom Hawking had met on a summer course before coming up to Cambridge. Narlikar was one of Hoyle’s students and working with Hoyle on possible modifications to general relativity that might reconcile the Steady State model with recent observations that called it into question. This challenge piqued Hawking’s curiosity.

  In June 1964, prior to publication of Hoyle’s work with Narlikar, Hoyle gave a lecture about it at the Royal Society. Hawking travelled to London to attend. When the floor was opened for questions, Hawking rose to his feet with the help of his stick and challenged one of Hoyle’s results. An astonished Hoyle asked Hawking how he could possibly judge whether the result was right or wrong. Hawking replied that he had ‘worked it out’. Unaware that Hawking and Narlikar had discussed the results many times and that Hawking had done calculations of his own, Hoyle and the audience assumed that this unknown research student had ‘worked it out’ in his head right there at the lecture. The audience was impressed; Hoyle was infuriated. Surprisingly, Hawking seems not to have lost the friendship of Narlikar. In any case, his reputation for brilliance and brashness had begun, and so had his interest in calculations and speculation having to do with the expanding universe.

  Hawking learned about a theory of the British mathematician and physicist Roger Penrose concerning what happens when a star has no nuclear fuel left to burn and collapses under the force of its own gravity. Penrose, building on earlier work by such physicists as Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and John Wheeler, claimed that even if the collapse isn’t perfectly smooth and symmetrical, the star will nevertheless be crushed to a tiny point of infinite density and infinit
e curvature of space-time, a singularity at the heart of a black hole.

  Hawking took off from there by reversing the direction of time, imagining a point of infinite density and infinite curvature of spacetime – a singularity – exploding outwards and expanding. Suppose, he suggested, the universe began like that. Suppose spacetime, curled up tight in a tiny, dimensionless point, exploded in what we call the Big Bang and expanded until it looks the way it does today. Might it have happened like that? Must it have happened like that?

  With these questions, Hawking began the intellectual adventure that has continued for more than forty-five years. As he says, ‘I started working hard for the first time in my life. To my surprise, I found I liked it. Maybe it is not really fair to call it work.’

  1965

  In the winter of 1965 Hawking applied for a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. Jane came up for the weekend from London, where she was still living while completing her degree at Westfield College, and Hawking reported that ‘I was hoping that Jane would type my application, but she had her arm in plaster, having broken it. I must admit that I was less sympathetic than I should have been. However, it was her left arm, so she was able to write out my application to my dictation, and I got someone else to type it.’

  Jane’s arm was not the worst setback he encountered applying for the Caius fellowship. He was asked to name two persons as references. Denis Sciama suggested Hermann Bondi. Stephen had attended lectures in Bondi’s general relativity course at King’s College London, but did not know him well. ‘I had met him a couple of times and he had communicated a paper I had written to the Royal Society. I asked him [about giving a reference] after a lecture he gave in Cambridge. He looked at me in a vague way and said, yes, he would. Obviously, he didn’t remember me, for, when the College wrote to him for a reference, he replied that he had not heard of me.’ That should have doomed Hawking’s chances. It might today, with so many applying for research fellowships, but he was fortunate. ‘Those were quieter times. The College wrote to tell me of the embarrassing reply of my referee. My supervisor got on to Bondi and refreshed his memory. Bondi then wrote me a reference that was probably far better than I deserved. Anyway I got the fellowship.’