Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  Another story tells of the time the four members of his tutorial group were set a collection of problems for the following week. On the morning the questions were due in, the other three came across Hawking in the common room slouched in an armchair reading a science fiction novel.

  “How have you got on with the problems, Steve?” one of them asked.

  “Oh, I haven’t tried them,” Hawking replied.

  “Well, you’d better get on with it,” said his friend. “The three of us have been working on them together for the past week and we’ve only managed to get one of them done.”

  Later that day the three of them encountered Hawking walking to the tutorial and inquired how he had done with the problems. “Oh,” he said, “I only had time to do nine of them.”

  Hawking kept very few notes and possessed only a handful of textbooks. In fact, he was so far ahead of the field that he had become distrustful of many standard textbooks. A further anecdote describes the time one of his tutors, a junior research fellow named Patrick Sandars, gave the class some problems from a book. Hawking turned up to the following tutorial having failed to complete any of the questions. When asked why, he spent the next twenty minutes pointing out all the errors in the textbook.

  Despite his lackadaisical attitude to things academic, he still managed to maintain a healthy relationship with his tutor, Dr. Berman. He would occasionally go for tea at the Bermans’ home on Banbury Road. In the summer they would hold parties on the back lawn, at which they would eat strawberries and play croquet. Dr. Berman’s wife, Maureen, took a particular liking to the rather eccentric young student whom her husband rated so highly as a physicist. Hawking would often arrive early for tea to ask her advice on what good books he should buy, and she guided him through a highbrow literary diet to supplement the physics texts he would occasionally read.

  His lack of effort hardly seemed to hold back his progress in physics. As an award student, he had to enter for the university physics prize at the end of the second year, for which all the other physicists in his year entered. With the minimum of effort he won the top award and received a Blackwell’s book token for £50.

  Maintaining his academic position in college and staying on the right side of Dr. Berman were one thing, but coping with the increasing boredom of it all was quite another, and at this time he might have nosedived into depression. Fortunately, in the second year he discovered an interest that would help him find some sort of stability: he took up rowing. Rowing has a long tradition at both Oxford and Cambridge, dating back centuries. Each year, the boat race between the two universities highlights the skills of the best oarsmen, who spend the rest of the year in intercollegiate races and training.

  Rowing is a very physical activity and is taken terribly seriously by those involved. Rowers go out on the water whatever the weather, rain or snow, breaking the ice on freezing winter mornings and sweating in the early summer heat. Rowing requires dedication and commitment, and that is the real reason for its popularity at university. It acts, at least for some students, as a perfect counterpoint to the stresses and demands of study. In Hawking’s case it was the perfect remedy for a calcifying boredom with everything else Oxford had to offer.

  Rowing is one of the most physically demanding sports around, and an oarsman simply has to be powerfully built to help move a boat through the water; but there is one other essential ingredient in every rowing team—the coxswain, or “cox.”

  Hawking was perfectly suited to coxing. He was light, so he did not burden the boat, and he had a loud voice with which he enjoyed barking instructions the length of the boat and enough discipline to attend all the training sessions. His rowing trainer was Norman Dix, who had been with the university college rowing club for decades. He recalls that Hawking was a competent enough cox, but never interested in advancing beyond the second crew. He suspects that the first crew held little appeal because it meant taking it all too seriously, and at that level the fun would have gone out of the whole thing.

  Dix remembers Hawking as a boisterous young fellow who from the beginning cultivated a daredevil image when it came to navigating his crew on the river. Many was the time he would return the eight to shore with bits of the boat knocked off and oar blades damaged because he had tried to guide his crew through an impossibly narrow gap and had come to grief. Dix never did believe Hawking’s claims that “something had gotten in the way.”

  “Half the time,” says Dix, “I got the distinct impression that he was sitting in the stern of the boat with his head in the stars, working out his mathematical formulae.”

  The crews worked hard on the river. They would be out in the boats nearly every day during term time, preparing for the big races, the Torpids, which take place in February, and the Summer Eights in the summer term. The term Torpids originally came from the adjective “torpid” because this would be the first competitive race in which freshmen could compete, and therefore the standard of many crews was pretty low. Having joined the Rowing Club in October, the novice rowers would have trained hard all winter in preparation for showing off their newfound skills by the fifth week of the winter term.

  Torpids are all college “bumping” races, taking place over several days. The thirteen boats competing start off one hundred and forty feet apart. Each is tied to the bank by a forty-foot line, the other end of which is held by the cox. When the starting gun goes off, the cox releases the line and the boats chase each other along a stretch of the river with the aim of bumping the boat in front without getting bumped themselves. The main task of the cox is to guide the crew so that they avoid being bumped by the boat behind but manage to bump the boat in front. The object of the exercise is to move up through the positions of the thirteen boats by managing to bump without being bumped; after each heat the “bumpers” and the “bumped” change places. If a crew does very well and moves up several places during the series of races, each crewmember is entitled to purchase an oar on which can be written the triumphant tally of bumps, the names of the crew, and the date. Such oars adorn the walls of victors’ studies. Hawking’s crews were pretty average, notching up only a modest number of bumps during their Torpids races, but the whole idea was to have fun and to relieve academic pressures.

  After the races came the celebrations and commiserations, both of which would be accompanied by a surfeit of ale, followed by a rowing club dinner in the college accompanied by speeches and toasts. And here was the real reason Hawking was involved at all. He had been something of a misfit during his first year, lonely and needing to alleviate the boredom of work that presented no challenge to him. The rowing club brought the nineteen-year-old out of himself and gave him an opportunity to become part of the university “in crowd.”

  When old school friends encountered Hawking during his second year, they could hardly believe the change in him. Variously described as “one of the lads” and “definitely raffish,” the slender, tousle-haired youth in his pink rowing club scarf seemed a far cry from the gawky schoolboy who had left St. Albans School less than two years earlier. He was no longer a social also-ran but a fully paid-up member of the “right” social set. It was very much an all-male domain; women rarely entered this world. It was, in a way, a continuation of the gang at St. Albans School, without the intellectual intensity but with a lot more alcohol. The idea was to drink copious amounts of ale, recount vaguely lurid stories, and have as much harmless fun as possible. However, his newfound taste for adventure almost got him into trouble.

  One night he decided to create a splash. After a few beers with a friend, the two of them headed off to one of the footbridges spanning the river. After leaving the pub, they picked up a can of paint and some brushes they had left at the college and hidden them inside a bag. When they arrived at the bridge, they set up a couple of wooden planks parallel to the span and suspended them over the water by a carefully arranged rope a few feet below the parapet. Clambering over the side, they positioned themselves on the planks with th
e can of paint and brushes and began to write. A few minutes later, just visible in the dark, were the words VOTE LIBERAL in foot-high letters along the side of the bridge and clear to anyone on the river when daylight broke.

  Then disaster struck. Just as Hawking was finishing off the last letter, the beam of a flashlight shone down on them from the bridge and an angry voice called out, “And what do you think you’re up to, then?” It was a local policeman. The two panicked, and Hawking’s friend scurried off the planks and onto the riverbank, hightailing it back to town and leaving Hawking with paintbrush in hand to face the music. The story goes that he simply got a ticking off from the local constabulary, and the incident was eventually forgotten. But it must have had the desired effect of scaring the life out of him, because he never clashed with the law again.

  Less than three years after arriving at Oxford University, Hawking again had to face the music when finals approached, and he suddenly found that he could have been better prepared. Dr. Berman knew that Hawking, for all his innate ability, would find the examinations harder than he anticipated. Berman realized that there were two types of student who did well at Oxford: those who were bright and worked very hard, and those who had great natural talent and worked very little. It was always the former who achieved greater things in written papers. That was the way of exams: winning end-of-year prizes was one thing, but finals were in a different league. They were all or nothing, the focal point of the whole three years of study. Hawking once calculated that during the entire three years of his course at Oxford he had done something like 1,000 hours’ work, an average of one hour per day—hardly a foundation for the arduous finals. One friend remembers with amusement, “Towards the end he was working as much as three hours a day!”

  However, Hawking had devised a plan. Because candidates had a wide choice of questions from each paper, he would, he decided, attempt only theoretical-physics problems and ignore those requiring detailed factual knowledge. He knew that he could do any theoretical question by using his proven natural talent and intuitive understanding of the subject. But there was an additional problem to complicate things: he had applied to Cambridge to begin Ph.D. studies in cosmology under the most distinguished British astronomer of the day, Fred Hoyle. The catch was that to be accepted for Cambridge, he had to achieve a first-class honors degree, the highest possible qualification at Oxford.

  The night before finals, Hawking panicked. He tossed and turned all night and got very little sleep. When morning came, he dressed up in subfusc (the regulation black gown, white shirt, and bow-tie worn by all examinees), left his rooms bleary-eyed and anxious, and headed for the examination halls a few yards along the High. Out on the street, hundreds of other identically dressed students streamed along the pavements, some clutching books under their arms, others puffing maniacally on their last cigarette before entering the examination hall—a feast for the tourist’s camera but abject misery for those having to sit through days of examinations.

  The examination halls themselves do their best to intimidate: high ceilings, great chandeliers hanging down from the void, row upon row of stark wooden desks and hard chairs. Invigilators pace up and down the rows, keeping an eagle eye on the candidates in their multitude of poses—staring at the ceiling or the middle distance, pen protruding between clenched teeth, or terminally absorbed, hunched over a manuscript in a free-flow trance. Hawking woke up a little as the paper was placed on the desk before him and duly followed through his plan of attempting only the theoretical problems.

  Exams over, he went off to celebrate the end of finals with the others of his year, guzzling champagne from the bottle and joining the throng of students ritualistically stopping the traffic on the High and spraying bubbly into the summer sky. After a short pause and a period of nail-biting anticipation, the results were announced. Hawking was on the borderline between a first and a second. To decide his fate, he would have to face a viva, a personal interview with the examiners.

  He was fully aware of his image at the university. He had the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he was considered a difficult student in that he was scruffy and seemingly lazy, more interested in drinking and having fun than working seriously. However, he underestimated how highly thought of were his abilities. Not only that, but as Berman is fond of saying, Hawking was in his element at a viva, because if the examiners had any intelligence they would soon see that he was cleverer than they were. At the interview he made a pronouncement that perfectly encapsulates the man’s matter-of-fact attitude and at the same time may have just saved his career. The chief examiner asked him to tell the board of his plans for the future.

  “If you award me a first,” he said, “I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a first.”

  They did.

  4

  DOCTORS AND DOCTORATES

  It has been said that Cambridge is the only true university town in England. Oxford is a much larger city and has, lying beyond the ring road, heavy industrial areas nestling next to one of Europe’s largest housing estates. Cambridge is altogether quainter and more thoroughly dominated by academia. Although evidence suggests that the University of Cambridge was established by defectors from Oxford, both seats of learning were created at around the same time in the twelfth century, using as their model the University of Paris. Like Oxford, Cambridge University is a collection of colleges under the umbrella of a central university authority. Like Oxford, it attracts the very best scholars from around the world and has a global reputation, paralleled only by its great rival and historical twin a mere eighty miles away. And, like Oxford, it is steeped in tradition, drama, and history.

  Having just returned from abroad, Stephen Hawking, B.A. (Hon.), arrived in Cambridge in October 1962, exchanging the scorched, barren landscape of the Middle East for autumnal wind and drizzle across the darkening fields of East Anglia. As he traveled past the meadows and gently rolling hills toward his new home that rainy morning, a darkening shadow hung skulking behind the peace and calm of the “only true university town in England,” and indeed behind every other human dwelling elsewhere on the planet, for the world was in the terrifying grip of the Cuba crisis.

  It really did seem as though the world could end in a blaze of nuclear fury at any moment. In these relatively calm post-glasnost days, it is perhaps hard to imagine the atmosphere of the time, the insecurity, and the uncertainty. Hawking was no different from the next man in experiencing a sense of hopelessness in the face of events over which he had absolutely no control. Old idols, the beautiful and the good, were fading and falling; new heroes stood on the sidelines, ready to emerge. Marilyn Monroe had died in August that year, John F. Kennedy had little more than twelve months to live, and the Beatles were poised on the brink of huge international fame unparalleled in the history of popular culture.

  Despite the overbearing threat of imminent annihilation, life in Cambridge went on pretty much as usual. Students began to settle into their new homes and find their feet in a strange city; the townsfolk continued about their daily business as they had done for the thousand years during which the city had existed. In the days leading up to his move to Cambridge, with the world outside looking set to tear itself apart, Stephen Hawking was gradually becoming aware of an inner personal crisis. Toward the end of his time at Oxford, he had begun to find some difficulty in tying his shoelaces, he kept bumping into things, and a number of times he felt his legs give way from under him. Without a drink passing his lips, he would, on occasion, find his speech slurring as though he were intoxicated. Not wanting to admit to himself that something was wrong, he said nothing and tried to get on with his life.

  Upon arriving in Cambridge another problem arose. When he had applied to do a Ph.D. at the university, there were two possible areas of research open to him: elementary particles, the study of the very small; and cosmology, the study of the very large. As he has said himself:

  I thought that ele
mentary particles were less attractive, because, although they were finding lots of new particles, there was no proper theory of elementary particles. All they could do was arrange the particles in families, like in botany. In cosmology, on the other hand, there was a well-defined theory—Einstein’s general theory of relativity.1

  However, there was a snag. He had originally chosen to go to Cambridge University because at the time Oxford could not offer cosmological research and, most important, he wanted to study under Fred Hoyle, who had a worldwide reputation as the most eminent scientist in the field. But instead of getting Hoyle, he was placed under the charge of one Dennis Sciama, of whom he had never heard. For a while this turn of events struck him as disastrous, but he came to realize that Sciama would be a far better supervisor because Hoyle was forever traveling abroad and could find little time to play the role of mentor. He soon discovered too that Dr. Sciama was himself a very fine scientist and a tremendously helpful and stimulating supervisor, always available for him to talk to.

  Hawking’s first term at Cambridge went rather badly. He found that he had not studied mathematics to a sufficiently high standard as an undergraduate and was soon struggling with the complex calculations involved in general relativity. He was still operating in his somewhat lazy work mode, and his research material was becoming increasingly demanding. For the second time in his life, he was beginning to flounder. Sciama (who died in 1999) recalled that although his student seemed exceptionally bright and ready to argue his point thoroughly and knowledgably, part of Hawking’s problem was finding a suitable research problem to study.

  The difficulty was that a research assignment had to be sufficiently taxing to meet the requirements of a Ph.D. course, and, because relativity research at that level was fairly new and unusual, the right sort of problem was not easy to find.