Stephen Hawking, His Life and Work

by Kitty Ferguson

  1985–1986

  In the autumn of 1985, with the Equalizer raising Hawking’s hopes of getting on with his career and his popular-level book, Jane and Laura Gentry interviewed and hired the twenty-four-hour nursing staff who were going to make life at home possible. There would be three shifts a day, and the nurses had to be trained medical professionals. The tube that had been inserted in his throat had to be suctioned out regularly with a ‘mini-vacuum cleaner’ so that secretions would not accumulate in his lungs. The ‘mini-vacuum cleaner’ itself could be a source of infection and cause damage if not used correctly.11 Not everyone they interviewed wanted this kind of demanding work, and there were also a few false starts.

  One applicant who was eager to have the job and willing to dedicate herself to it long term was Elaine Mason, a physically strong, athletic woman with a zany sense of humour and a wonderful taste for colours that showed off her red hair. She impressed Jane as a caring person. Born Elaine Sybil Lawson in Hereford, Elaine was a devout Evangelical Christian whose father, Henry Lawson, had been a clergyman in the Church of England and whose mother had a medical degree. Elaine had worked for four years in an orphanage in Bangladesh, then come back to England and married David Mason, a computer engineer. They had two sons, one about the age of Tim Hawking.

  I knew Elaine and David Mason and their sons only as a family with children in the same school as ours, but I remember that on parents’ day I competed successfully with Elaine in the egg-and-spoon race. She was reputed to be fiercely competitive, but that wasn’t evident in this particular sport. She seemed a refreshingly irrepressible, uninhibited woman.

  Stephen’s and Jane’s hiring of Elaine became a fortuitous choice when her husband adapted a small computer and speech synthesizer and attached it to Hawking’s wheelchair. Before that Hawking could run the Equalizer only on his desktop computer. Now his voice could go with him wherever he went. David Mason, like his wife, was devoted to Hawking. ‘If he raised an eyebrow, you would run a mile,’ he said.12

  The Hawking household adapted to the new tensions of living a much less private life, in what seemed like a small-scale hospital with strangers abroad in it twenty-four hours a day. Hawking managed to recover enough strength and to handle the Equalizer program well enough to return to his office before Christmas. There were no more solo trips across the Backs; a nurse went with him. In many ways, things were looking up. His son Robert received his A-level exam results and, to everyone’s relief, they were excellent. Cambridge would accept Robert for the following autumn, to read natural science as his father had at Oxford.

  By the spring of 1986, life had begun to settle into a new, rather optimistic status quo, with one sad break in March when Frank Hawking, Stephen’s father, died. Hawking’s mother Isobel has said that Hawking was ‘very upset by his father’s death – it was rather a dreadful thing. He was very fond of his father, but they had grown apart rather and hadn’t seen a great deal of each other in the late years.’13 Hawking, of course, soldiered on. Soon he resumed his travels. His first trip away, to a conference in Sweden, was a success in more ways than one. Murray Gell-Mann was another attendee and witnessed first hand Hawking’s ability to take a full part in the conference – evidence of how well the MacArthur funds were being put to work. Jane’s application in October for an extension of the funding was approved. Now it would cover medical expenses as well as nurses on a continuing basis.

  The Assault on the Airport Bookshops

  Having mastered the Equalizer program, Hawking went back to work on his popular-level book in the spring of 1986. It hadn’t taken him long, characteristically, to begin to regard the new level of disability as an advantage rather than a calamity. ‘In fact,’ said Hawking, ‘I can communicate better now than before I lost my voice.’14 That statement is often quoted as an example of raw courage. It was, in fact, the simple truth. He no longer needed to dictate or speak through an ‘interpreter’.

  Bantam had accepted Hawking’s first draft for the book in the summer of 1985, but, with his catastrophic health problems, there had been no opportunity to move forward with the project. In any case, moving forward was not going to be an easy task. Bantam was insisting on some revisions. Hawking ended up almost completely rewriting his first draft.

  He knew that even in non-technical language the concepts in his book would not be easy for most people. He claims he is not overly fond of equations himself, in spite of the fact that people compare his ability to handle them in his head to Mozart’s mentally composing a whole symphony. It is difficult for him to write equations, even though the Equalizer allows him to express them in words and then rewrites them with symbols. He says he has no intuitive feeling for them. As Kip Thorne pointed out, he likes to think instead in pictures. This, in fact, seemed an excellent method for the book: to describe his mental images in words, helped along with familiar analogies and a few diagrams.

  Hawking’s and his graduate assistant Whitt’s mode of operation fell into a pattern. Hawking would explain something in scientific language and then realize that his readers would not understand. He and Whitt would try to think of an analogy, but neither was willing to use analogies willy-nilly without being certain they were truly valid. Making sure of their validity occasioned lengthy discussions. Hawking wondered just how much to explain. Were some complicated matters better glossed over and left at that? Would explaining too much lead to confusion? Ultimately Hawking explained a great deal.

  His editor at Bantam, Peter Guzzardi, wasn’t a scientist. He felt that whatever he couldn’t understand in the manuscript needed rewriting. He pointed out something that Hawking’s students and colleagues had sometimes complained about: Hawking often jumped from thought to thought and came to surprising conclusions, wrongly assuming others could see the connections. Some attributed this to Hawking’s need to use few words, but the reason went deeper than that, and his scientific colleagues were experiencing something of the same jumps on a far more advanced level than Peter Guzzardi. Whitt said that sometimes Hawking would tell him that something must be so ‘because of what I understand’, not because he could prove it or explain how he arrived there. Brian would do the calculations and sometimes have to report to Hawking that he had been wrong, and Hawking would not believe him. Then after some consideration and talking about it, Brian would realize that Hawking was right after all. ‘His hunch was better than my calculation. I think that’s a very important aspect of his mind: the ability to think ahead rather than go step by step; to jump the simple calculations and just come up with a conclusion.’15 Nevertheless, for Hawking’s editor Guzzardi, jumping the connections between his conclusions wasn’t acceptable for a popular-level book. Even when Hawking felt he’d explained simply, Guzzardi often found the explanation unfathomable. At one point, Bantam tactfully suggested having an experienced science writer write the book for Hawking. Hawking vehemently rejected that idea. The revision process became tedious. Each time Hawking submitted a rewritten chapter, Guzzardi sent back a lengthy list of objections and questions. Hawking was irritated, but in the end he admitted that his editor was right. ‘It is a much better book as a result,’ he said.16

  Editors at Cambridge University Press who had seen Hawking’s book proposal had warned him that every equation he used would cut book sales in half. Guzzardi agreed. Hawking eventually decided he would include only one equation: Einstein’s E=mc2. Guzzardi prevailed in a disagreement about the title. When Hawking got nervous about the use of the word ‘brief’, Guzzardi replied that he liked it very much, it made him smile. That argument won the day. The title would be A Brief History of Time. The second draft was finally completed a year after they had begun working on it, in the spring of 1987.

  By then, Hawking was also fully involved in the physics world again, continuing his career and gathering more honours and awards. In October 1986 he had received an appointment to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the whole Hawking family had an audience with the Pope. He was
awarded the first Paul Dirac Medal from the Institute of Physics. In June and July 1987, after the final draft of A Brief History of Time was completed, Cambridge hosted an international conference to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, one of the most significant books in the history of science. Hawking was instrumental in bringing this event about. In connection with it, he and Werner Israel solicited articles from leaders in the fields connected with gravitation and put together the splendid book 300 Years of Gravitation.17

  When A Brief History of Time was nearing publication, in the early spring of 1988, Don Page was sent an advance copy to review for the journal Nature. Page was appalled to find it full of errors: photographs and diagrams in the wrong places and wrongly labelled. He placed an urgent call to Bantam. Bantam editors decided to recall and scrap the entire printing. Then began the intense process of correcting and republishing the book in time to have it in bookshops by the April publication date in the United States. Page now believes he owns one of the few extant copies of the original printing of Hawking’s book. That copy is probably quite valuable.

  Hawking enjoys pointing out that the American edition of A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes was published on April Fool’s Day, 1988. The British edition was launched at a luncheon at the Royal Society on 16 June. The Hawkings watched, astounded, as the book climbed effortlessly to the top of the bestseller lists. There it stayed week after unlikely week, then month after month, soon selling a million copies in America. In Britain the publisher could barely keep enough books on the shelves to meet the demand. Translations into other languages quickly followed. The book was indeed prominently displayed in airport bookstalls, and Hawking had to face the difficulty of getting his speech synthesizer to pronounce the word ‘Guinness’ when he and his book made the Guinness Book of World Records. It insisted on saying ‘Guy-ness’. ‘Maybe it is because it is an American speech synthesizer,’ Hawking quipped. ‘If only I had an Irish one …’18

  Perhaps thanks to his persistent editor, Hawking had succeeded in making it possible (though not always easy) to follow him logically from thought to thought, sometimes even to anticipate him. This was a book to be studied, if you didn’t have a scientific background, not read quickly. It was well worth the effort, and it was also good entertainment. Hawking’s humour makes A Brief History of Time in its way a romp through the history of time, not safe to read in any situation where it would be awkward to burst out laughing.

  Stephen Hawking rapidly became a household word and a popular hero all over the world. Fans organized a club in Chicago and printed Hawking T-shirts. One member admitted that some of his school friends thought this Hawking on his T-shirt must be a rock star; a few even claimed to have his latest album.

  Reviews were favourable. One compared the book to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Jane Hawking was horrified, but Stephen Hawking declared he was flattered, that this meant his book ‘gives people the feeling that they need not be cut off from the great intellectual and philosophical questions’.19

  Did people who bought the book read it and understand it? Some critics suggested that most of those who purchased it never read it and, if they tried, couldn’t possibly understand it. They just wanted it to be seen on their coffee table. Hawking lashed back rather forcefully in the foreword to A Brief History of Time: A Reader’s Companion: ‘I think some critics are rather patronizing to the general public. They feel that they, the critics, are very clever people, and if they can’t understand my book completely then ordinary mortals have no chance.’20 He wasn’t overly concerned about its being left on coffee tables and bookcases just for show. The Bible and Shakespeare, he pointed out, have shared that fate for centuries. Nevertheless, he thought lots of people read his book, because he got mounds of letters about it. Many asked questions and made detailed comments. He was often stopped by strangers in the street who said how much they enjoyed it; this pleased him immensely but embarrassed his son Timmy.

  Hawking’s increasing celebrity status and the need to publicize the book gave him even more opportunities for travel than before. A Hawking visit usually left his hosts exhausted. The Rockefeller Institute in New York was the scene of one such occasion. After a long day of lectures and public appearances, there was a banquet in Hawking’s honour. Hawking relished such events and made a show of sniffing the wine and commenting on it. Dinner and speeches over, the party moved to the embankment overlooking the East River. Everyone was petrified lest Hawking roll into the river. To their relief he didn’t, and they soon had him safely headed back towards his hotel. In a ballroom opening off the lobby, a dance was going on. Hawking insisted that they not retire yet but crash the party. Unable to dissuade their headstrong honoree, the little group of distinguished scholars hesitatingly agreed, ‘although we never do anything like that!’ On the dance floor Hawking twirled about in his wheelchair with one partner after another. The band went on playing for him far into the night, long after the original party was over.

  Would Hawking write a sequel to his book? Asked that frequently, he answered that he thought not. ‘What would I call it? A Longer History of Time? Beyond the End of Time? Son of Time?’21 Perhaps A Brief History of Time II – ‘just when you thought it was safe to go back into the airport bookstore!’ Would he write his autobiography? Not until he runs out of money to pay his nurses, or so he told me. That was not likely to be soon. Time magazine announced in August 1990 that A Brief History of Time had so far sold over 8 million copies, and they were still selling. If only he had left out that one equation!

  Some accused Bantam and Hawking of exploiting Hawking’s condition in marketing the book. They sniffed that his fame and popularity were like a carnival sideshow and blamed Hawking for allowing an overdramatic, grotesque picture to appear on the book cover. Hawking rejoined that his contract gave him absolutely no control over the cover. He did persuade the publisher to use a better picture on the British edition.

  On the plus side, the media exposure allowed Hawking to give the world something that may be at least as valuable as his scientific theories and the information that the universe is probably not ‘turtles all the way down’.fn1 It brought to millions not only his keen excitement about his work but also the important reminder that there is a profound kind of health which transcends the boundaries of any illness.

  For the Hawkings the success of the book brought more than a change in financial status, making Hawking into what CAM magazine called ‘that rarest of phenomena, a Labour-voting multi-millionaire’.22 For years, he and Jane and their children had lived with disability and the threat of death. As Jane Hawking described it: ‘In a sense we’ve always been living on the edge of the precipice, and eventually you put down roots at the edge of the precipice. I think that’s what we’ve done.’23 Now they found themselves threatened in a different way, by the allure and demands of celebrity and the frightening prospect of living up to a worldwide fairy-tale image.

  In the mid- to late 1980s, it was often Elaine Mason who accompanied Hawking in his travels, and their growing fondness for one another was evident in a series of photographs taken by a friend of Elaine’s, New York photographer Miriam Berkeley. Unfortunately, Elaine’s fierce loyalty to Hawking, her protectiveness, her jealously guarded relationship with him and the strength of her personality were beginning not to sit so well with his family, others of his nurses and carers, or with colleagues and staff in the DAMTP. But her relationship with Hawking was a special relationship that was not going to evaporate any time soon. Others were competent and sympathetic, but it was Elaine he preferred to have with him as much as possible.

  fn1 In his book A Brief History of Time Hawking retold the story of an elderly lady who rose at the end of a scientific lecture to take exception with the speaker and insist that the world is a plate supported on the back of a giant turtle. When the speaker asked what she thought the turtle was standing on, she replied that h
e was very clever to ask that question, but in fact it was ‘turtles all the way down’.

  12

  ‘The field of baby universes is in its infancy’

  AS EARLY AS the 1970s, magazine articles and television specials had told Stephen Hawking’s story. In the late 1980s, after the publication of A Brief History of Time, virtually every periodical in the world profiled him. Reporters and photographers greeted him everywhere. ‘COURAGEOUS PHYSICIST KNOWS THE MIND OF GOD’, blared the headlines. His picture was on the cover of Newsweek with the words ‘MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE’ emblazoned across a dramatic background of stars and nebulae. In 1989 he and his family were interviewed for ABC’s show 20/20, and in England a new television special appeared: Master of the Universe: Stephen Hawking. He was no longer merely well-known and successful. He’d become an idol, a superstar, in a class with sports heroes and rock musicians.

  Jane Hawking spoke of her ‘sense of fulfilment that we have been able to remain a united family, that the children are absolutely superb and that Stephen is still able to live at home and do his work’.1 The world at large knew nothing about Jonathan Hellyer Jones or Elaine Mason and it seemed advisable to keep it that way.

  The academic awards kept pouring in: five more honorary degrees and seven more international awards. One of them was the 1988 Wolf Prize, awarded by the Wolf Foundation of Israel and recognized as second in prestige only to the Nobel Prize in Physics. Another Cambridge luminary, Christopher Polge, won the Wolf Prize for Agriculture the same year, and he and his wife Olive and the Hawkings often found themselves feted together. Stephen replied to one interviewer that he did not ‘believe in God; there is no room for God in my universe’, a statement that Jane found particularly hurtful because they were in Jerusalem, a city with deep spiritual significance for her.