Another boost to Stephen’s professional standing in the spring of 1965 was a ‘commendation prize’ in the privately funded Gravity Prize Competition. He might have done better than ‘commendation’ had he not missed the deadline for submissions, but, with his wedding coming up, £100 was welcome.28 During that same spring, at an international conference on general relativity and gravitation in London – the first such event he ever attended – Stephen met Kip Thorne from the California Institute of Technology. Thorne already had his Ph.D. from Princeton. Thorne was deeply impressed with the way this young man who walked with a cane and seemed somewhat wobbly, and spoke with a slight hesitation, was taking techniques introduced into general relativity by Roger Penrose and adapting them to investigate the structure and history of the universe. Their conversation in a tearoom at the conference was the beginning of a life-long friendship. Thorne is one of a handful of friends, perhaps the only one, with whom Hawking has had frank, matter-of-fact discussions about his bleak expectations for the future.
On 14 July 1965, Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde were married in a civil ceremony, followed the next day by a religious ceremony in the chapel of Trinity Hall.
Theoretical physics is full of paradoxes. It seems appropriate that one of our great theoretical physicists is a man whose enthusiasm for life was awakened by a tragedy that ought to have embittered and destroyed him, and that his meteoric rise as a scientist started with the practical need for a thesis topic so that he could get a job and marry. With what simplicity Hawking described it: in spite of the Wagner, the tragic hero self-image and the dreams; a year, maybe more, of depression … then ‘I was happier than I’d been before.’
fn1 May Balls in Cambridge usually happen in June.
5
‘The big question was, was there a beginning or not?’
AFTER THEIR WEDDING and a short honeymoon in Suffolk, which was all they could afford, Stephen and Jane Hawking set out across the Atlantic to America for a general relativity summer school at Cornell University in upper New York State. The summer school was another opportunity for Hawking to meet top people in his field. However, he remembers the experience as ‘a mistake’. ‘It put quite a strain on our marriage, specially as we stayed in a dormitory that was full of couples with noisy small children.’1
One summer evening at Cornell, chatting with friends in the night air – chilly in those climes despite the time of year – Hawking suddenly had a choking fit. He knew he should expect such episodes, but since he had resolutely refused to discuss his problems with Jane, she did not, and she had no idea what to do to help him. Finally he signalled her to give him a hard thump on the back. This solved the immediate problem, but the experience left Jane shaken and vividly aware of what faced them. ‘The demonic nature of the illness had announced its presence.’2
In October, Hawking, aged twenty-three, began his fellowship at Caius. Jane Hawking had another year to go to complete her undergraduate degree at London University. As planned, Hawking would fend for himself during the week. She would join him for the weekends. Since he couldn’t walk far or cycle, they needed Cambridge lodgings near his department. Before going to America they had applied for a flat being built in the market square. No one told them that those flats were actually owned by Hawking’s college, which might have given their application an advantage. As it turned out, that didn’t matter because the flats weren’t ready for occupancy that autumn.
The bursar at Caius had earlier informed Stephen that Caius policy was not to help Fellows find housing. Relenting only slightly, he offered Stephen and Jane one room in a graduate student hostel and charged them double because there would be two of them living there at weekends. Then, three days after moving into the hostel, they discovered a small house available for three months in Little St Mary’s Lane – one of a group of picturesque cottages that line one side of the lane across from Little St Mary’s Church and churchyard garden. The house was only a hundred yards from the new Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) premises in Silver Street, where Stephen was sharing an office with another young physicist, Brandon Carter. He was able to walk that distance, and he acquired a small three-wheeled car to drive when he needed to get to the Institute of Astronomy in the countryside near town. Later that autumn, when their first three-month lease was approaching its end, the Hawkings learned that another house in the lane was unoccupied. A helpful neighbour located the owner in Dorset and upbraided her for having her house vacant while a young couple had no place to live. The owner agreed to rent.
The choking fits became more frequent. Stephen’s sister Mary, still working towards her medical degree at London University, suggested that warmer, drier weather might help. Partly on that advice, in December at the end of the Michaelmas term, the Hawkings took advantage of an opportunity to cross the ocean for a second time. Stephen attended an astrophysics conference in Miami, and from there they went on to Austin, Texas, to spend a week with one of his graduate school friends George Ellis and his wife. They returned to England in time for Christmas and the move into their second, more permanent home in Little St Mary’s Lane.
Both Stephen and Jane followed punishing schedules during that first year of their marriage. Hawking was still keenly aware of his lack of mathematical background. Being, as his mother has said, a ‘self-educator’, he decided to use a time-honoured graduate student method of improving one’s own knowledge while also earning some money: if you want or need to learn a subject, teach it. So, in addition to working on his Ph.D. thesis, he supervised undergraduate mathematics for the college.3 Jane managed her weekly commute, finished her undergraduate degree, engineered the move from one house to another, and typed her husband’s Ph.D. dissertation.
They celebrated the completion of Stephen’s Ph.D. in March 1966, and there was more to celebrate. Hawking had submitted an essay, ‘Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time’, in competition for the prestigious Adams Prize, awarded by St John’s College, Cambridge, and named for John Couch Adams, co-discoverer of the planet Neptune. The winner had to be a young researcher who was based in Britain, and the work had to be of international calibre. Hawking’s essay was co-winner with Roger Penrose’s entry. A proud Denis Sciama told Jane that, in his opinion, Stephen could look forward to a career worthy of Isaac Newton.4 In spite of his physical difficulties and bleak prospects, these were halcyon days: Cambridge in the 1960s was an extremely stimulating place for someone with Hawking’s interests. Everything seemed possible. Surprisingly much was!5
That spring, Jane Hawking, eager to maintain some intellectual identity and purpose of her own, decided to continue her education and work towards a Ph.D. from London University. For her thesis topic she chose a critical treatment of previously published medieval Spanish texts. This topic allowed her to do her research in libraries rather than from primary sources. Even so, deciding to pursue a Ph.D. was a bold step, for Stephen was requiring more and more care and it was also about this time that the Hawkings decided to start a family. In the autumn of 1966, when Jane’s first pregancy began, Stephen’s fingers were beginning to curl and writing by hand became almost impossible for him. In an extraordinary move, for which Sciama was responsible, the Institute of Physics funded physical therapy at home for him twice a week.6
The Hawkings’ first child, Robert, was born on 28 May 1967. It was four years since doctors had told Stephen Hawking he had two years to live. He was still on his feet, and he was a father. Jane recalls: ‘It obviously gave Stephen a great new impetus, being responsible for this tiny creature.’7
Robert was still an infant when his parents whisked him off to America, on their first visit to the west coast. Hawking attended a seven-week summer school in Seattle, Washington. After this there was a fortnight at the University of California, Berkeley. He was living up to the reputation for ‘international calibre’ that had helped him win the Adams Prize. They ended the trip with a hop across the continent to spend time with
Hawking’s childhood friend John McClenahan (the friend who had bet that Hawking would never amount to anything) and Hawking’s sister Mary, who now was practising medicine in the eastern United States. After nearly four months in America, Stephen, Jane and their baby returned to Cambridge in October in time for the Michaelmas term. Caius College had renewed Stephen’s fellowship for two more years.
People who remember Stephen Hawking in the DAMTP in the mid- to late 1960s recall his making his way around the corridors with a cane, supporting himself against the wall and speaking with what sounded like a speech impediment. More than that, they remember his brashness in sessions involving some of the world’s most distinguished scientists. The reputation that had begun when he challenged Fred Hoyle in 1964 was being reinforced regularly. While other young researchers kept a reverent silence, Hawking daringly asked unexpected and penetrating questions and clearly knew what he was talking about. The comments about ‘a genius’, ‘another Einstein’, began then. In spite of Hawking’s ready wit and popularity, that reputation and his physical problems distanced him from some in the department. One acquaintance told me: ‘He was very friendly always, but at the same time, some felt a little shy about asking him out with the gang for a beer at the pub.’ It’s no wonder Hawking feels it’s been a problem preventing people from thinking of him as ‘anything less or more than simply human’.8
In the late 1960s, Hawking’s physical condition began deteriorating again. He had to use crutches. Then it became difficult for him to get about even with crutches. He waged a pitched battle against the loss of his independence. A visitor remembers watching him spend fifteen minutes getting up the stairs to bed on his crutches, determined to do it without help. His determination sometimes seemed to be pigheadedness. Hawking refused to make concessions to his illness, even when those ‘concessions’ were practical steps to make things easier for him and make him less of a burden to others. It was his battle. He would fight it his way. His way was to regard any concession as caving in, an admission of defeat, and to resist as long as possible. ‘Some people would call it determination, some obstinacy,’ says Jane Hawking. ‘I’ve called it both at one time or another. I suppose that’s what’s kept him going.’9 John Boslough, who wrote a book about Hawking in the early 1980s, called him ‘the toughest man I have ever met’.10 Even with a bad cold or flu, Hawking rarely missed a day of work. Meanwhile, while Hawking refused to make concessions to his illness, Jane Hawking learned to make no concessions to him. This was her way of fighting and part of her campaign to keep his life as normal as possible.
Boslough also described Hawking as a ‘gentle, witty man’, who quickly made you forget about his physical problems. That ‘gentle’ wit cut through all nonsense and pretension. Hawking’s ability to make light of himself, his problems, and even the science he was so keen on was awe-inspiring. It helped others to like him and most of the time eclipsed the feelings of ‘differentness’. For some he became, in the department, the most fun to be around. Hawking seems to have been following, without probably ever having read it, the advice Louisa May Alcott’s mother gave her family in times of overwhelming distress: ‘Hope and keep busy.’
Hawking’s future was more threatened by his communication problems than by his immobility. His speech was becoming more and more slurred and indistinct, so much so that Caius College and the University had to face the fact that he could not give regular lectures. His research fellowship was about to expire again in 1969. Once more Denis Sciama saved the day, this time with help from Hermann Bondi. A rumour got about – no one knows who started it, and maybe it was true – that King’s College, just down the street, was going to offer Hawking a Senior Research Fellowship. Caius came up with a way to keep him – a six-year contract for a specially created ‘Fellowship for Distinction in Science’. Hawking was becoming an important physicist. He was far too valuable to lose.
Hawking’s science continued to occupy his mind far more than concern about canes and crutches and stairs. His almost obsessive enjoyment of his work set the tone of his life. In the late 1960s he was finding out what the universe is like and how it might have begun – what he describes as playing ‘the game of universe’. In order to understand the work he was immersed in, we have to go back thirty-five years.
The Game of Universe
Today we take it for granted that we live in a lacy spiral disc galaxy – the Milky Way – one of many galaxies more or less like it in the universe, with vast stretches of space between them. Early in the twentieth century not everyone accepted this picture. It was the American astronomer Edwin Hubble who, in the 1920s, showed that there are indeed many galaxies besides our own. Is there any pattern to the movement of these galaxies? Hubble showed that there is, with one of the most revolutionary discoveries of the century: the distant galaxies are all moving away from us. The universe is expanding.
Hubble found that the more distant a galaxy is, the more rapidly it’s moving away from us: twice as far, twice as fast. We observe some extremely distant galaxies receding as fast as two-thirds the speed of light. Does that mean every star in the universe is moving away from us? No. Our near neighbours are milling around, some approaching, some receding. It’s between clusters of galaxies that space is expanding. The most helpful way to think of the expansion of the universe is not as things rushing away from one another but as space between them swelling. It’s an oversimplification, but imagine a loaf of raisin bread rising in the oven. As the dough swells, the raisins move apart. ‘Twice as far, twice as fast’ works with raisins as well as with galaxies.
If galaxies are receding from us and from each other, then unless something has changed drastically somewhere along the line, they used to be much closer together. At some moment in the past, wouldn’t they all have been in exactly the same place? All the enormous amount of matter in the universe packed in a single point, infinitely dense?
That isn’t the only possible history of an expanding universe. Perhaps there was once a universe something like ours, and that universe contracted, with all its galaxies getting closer together, looking as though they were on collision course. But galaxies and stars, and atoms and particles, for that matter, have other motion in addition to the motion that draws them straight towards one another. Planets orbit stars, for instance. The result in that universe might have been that, instead of meeting in a point of infinite density, the galaxies, or the particles that made them up, missed one another, flew past, and the universe expanded again until it looks the way it does today. Could it have happened like that? Which way did it happen? These were questions Hawking had begun to consider in his Ph.D. thesis. ‘The big question was,’ says Hawking, ‘was there a beginning or not?’11
His search for an answer began, as we mentioned in Chapter 4, with an idea introduced by Roger Penrose in 1965. Penrose’s idea concerned the way some stars may end up – something that three years later was going to be given the spectacular name ‘black hole’ by John Archibald Wheeler. The concept combined what we know about gravity with what general relativity tells us about the behaviour of light. Hawking’s friend Kip Thorne would later remember 1965–80 as a golden age of black hole research. In the enormous achievements made, Hawking was in the vanguard.12
What Do We Know about Gravity and Light?
Gravity is the most familiar of the four forces. We all learned early in life that it’s gravity you blame when your ice cream cone splats on the rug or when you fall off a swing. Asked to guess whether gravity is a very weak or a very strong force, you might answer ‘incredibly strong’. You would be wrong. It’s by far the weakest of the four forces. The gravity that’s so conspicuous in our everyday lives is the gravity of this great hulk of a planet we live on, the combined gravity of every particle in it. The contribution of each individual particle is infinitesimal. It takes sensitive instruments to detect the faint gravitational attraction between small, everyday objects. However, because gravity always attracts, never repels, it has a tal
ent for adding up.
Physicist John Wheeler liked to think of gravity as a sort of universal democratic system. Every particle has a vote that can affect every other particle in the universe. When particles band together and vote as a bloc (in a star, for instance, or in our Earth), they wield more influence. The very weak gravitational attraction of the individual particles in large bodies like the Earth adds up to a significant force: an influential voting bloc.
The more matter particles there are making up a body, the more mass that body has. Mass is not the same as size. Mass is a measure of how much matter is in an object, how many votes are in the voting bloc (regardless of how densely or loosely the matter is packed), and how much the object resists any attempt to change its speed or direction.
Sir Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in the 1600s, the same position Hawking would hold, discovered laws explaining how gravity works in more or less normal circumstances. According to Newton, bodies are not ‘at rest’ in the universe. They don’t just sit still until some force comes along to push or pull them and then later ‘run down’ and sit still again. Instead, a body left completely undisturbed continues to move in a straight line without changing speed. It’s best to think of everything in the universe as being in motion. We can measure our speed or direction in relation to other objects in the universe, but we can’t measure them in relation to absolute stillness or anything that resembles absolute north, south, east, west, or up or down.
Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work Page 7