My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus – Stephen Hawking
Albert Einstein’s teacher had a rather terrible thing to say about him: “You will never amount to anything”. But Stephen Hawking’s doctor told him something much, much worse: “You only have two years to live”.
And that was way back in 1963. The doctor’s prediction was exactly 53 years off the mark. Not only did he (probably) outlive his doctor, he also defied all odds on an ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Motor Neurone Disease) patient living for more than five years. Hawking lived till 76. (There is still no cure for ALS, despite medical advances).
In his own words: “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last five decades. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first. While there’s life, there is hope”.
Einstein
Incidentally, apart from being two of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, astrophysicist Hawking passed away on the 139th birth anniversary of Einstein (March 14). The two men never met in real life - Hawking was just 13 when Einstein passed away in 1955. But they did meet in virtual life – Hawking played poker with the holograms of Einstein and Isaac Newton (whose Lucasian Professor of Mathematics position at Cambridge was eventually occupied by Hawking) in an episode of Star Trek, becoming the only person ever to play himself in the hit science fiction series set in the 23rd century and beyond.
This is what distinguished Hawking from other scientists. He had an uncanny ability to explain science to the masses in a way they could understand and he used every available medium to do so. He took his message to the masses via his appearances on TV and through his many books, the most famous one being “A Brief History of Time” which sold 10 million copies.
Being confined to a wheelchair and speaking through a voice synthesizer (after losing his voice due to an acute attack of pneumonia) did not deter him in the least. Interestingly, although the voice actually belonged to computer scientist Dennis Klatt who helped perfect his computer and voice synthesizer, it did not prevent Hawking from actually copyrighting that voice. He once even told Queen Elizabeth II about the copyright.
He loved pop culture and in turn, the public loved him more as a celebrity than a scientist. He was a huge fan of The Simpsons, making four appearances over the years and also in the Big Bang theory. On one wall of his office at Cambridge University was a clock depicting Homer Simpson, whose theory of a “doughnut-shaped universe” he threatened to steal in an episode of the cartoon show.
While still alive
He was one of the few people who had films made about them while still alive - the 2014 hit movie The Theory of Everything starring Eddie Redmayne as Hawking (an Oscar wining performance), Hawking (starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Hawking) and Beyond the Horizon are among them.
He also did the usual roster of TV documentaries on cosmology. Since then, many other scientists have followed in his footsteps to take science to a wider audience, including Neil deGrasse Tyson and David Suzuki. Neil was one of the first to express his sadness over the demise of Hawking via Twitter.
The real Big Bang Theory (not the TV series) was another scientific phenomenon that brought Einstein and Hawking together in a metaphorical sense. Hawking was keen to work on a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) that encapsulated most if Einstein’s work and his own research. He hoped that such a theory would resolve the contradictions between Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of gravity that govern the motion of large objects like planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the world of subatomic particles. For Hawking, the search was almost a religious quest. He said finding a “Theory of Everything” (which would later become the title of a biopic) would allow mankind to “know the mind of God.” However, he was generally known as an atheist and directly told the El Mundo magazine that he was one.
“A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence,” he wrote in “A Brief History of Time.” He followed up “A Brief History of Time” in 2001 with the sequel, “The Universe in a Nutshell”, which updated readers on concepts like super gravity, naked singularities and the possibility of an 11-dimensional universe. Hawking first earned prominence for his theoretical work on black holes. Disproving the belief that black holes are so dense that nothing could escape their gravitational pull, he showed that black holes leak a tiny bit of light and other types of radiation, now known as “Hawking Radiation.” Hawking also proposed in 1983 that space and time might have no beginning and no end.
Alien life
Even Hawking could not fully comprehend the sheer scale of the Universe or how it came into being in the first place. “But one can’t help asking the question: Why does the universe exist?” he said in 1991. “I don’t know an operational way to give the question or the answer, if there is one, a meaning. But it bothers me. My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the Universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.’
But Hawking saw the possibility of getting a second Earth (or two) out in the vastness of space. Just a few months ago, he said humanity would be doomed if they stayed on Planet Earth due to climate change, a killer virus, asteroid impact, warfare etc and called on Governments to expedite research to send people to other planets within at least the next 200 years. “Spreading out into space will completely change the future of humanity. It may also determine whether we have any future at all,” he told a reporter.
He did admit to the possibility of finding alien life, but personally would not savour such an encounter. ‘If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn’t turn out well for the Native Americans. We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet,” he said. In 2015 he teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner who has launched a series of projects aimed at finding evidence of alien life. The decade-long Breakthrough Listen initiative aims to step up the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) by listening out for alien signals with more sensitivity than ever before.
Hawking was also intrigued about the possibility of high-speed space travel. He gave his blessings to the Starshot Initiative, announced in 2016 that envisages sending tiny light-propelled robot space craft on a 20-year voyage to the Alpha Centauri star system. He had even booked a seat on Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic sub-orbital space plane and rehearsed for the trip by floating inside a steep-diving NASA aircraft - dubbed the “Vomit Comet” - used to simulate weightlessness.
On the ground, he travelled around Cambridge at surprising speed, travelled and lectured widely around the world (his last lecture was delivered in Japan this year), and enjoyed his fame. He retired from his chair as Lucasian Professor of Cambridge in 2009 and took up a research position with the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.
Another area that Hawking took an interest in was Artificial Intelligence, which he claimed would soon reach a level where it will be a ‘new form of life that will outperform humans.’ He even went so far as to say that AI may replace humans altogether. “Someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans. Some form of government is needed to control the technology.”
For all his seriousness about the depths of the universe and other matters such as AI, Hawking was known for his brilliant sense of humour and off-the-cuff quotes.
Perhaps this was his way of overcoming his disability and giving hope to sufferers of ALS. “Life would be tragic if it weren’t funny,” he once said.
Women
Hawking had a complex relationship with women. Once, when someone asked him what was the most difficult thing he could not understand in the universe, he replied “women – they are a complete mystery”. When nightclub magnate Peter Stringfellow once spotted him at one of his venues, he asked if he could be spared a minute to chat about the Universe, then said: ‘Or would you rather look at the girls?’ ‘There was silence for a moment,’ recalled Stringfellow, ‘and then he answered: “The girls.”’
He went through an acrimonious divorce from his wife Jane Wilde in 1995 and married his nurse Elaine Mason. That too ended in divorce in 2006. He had three children (Robert, Lucy and Tim) from his first marriage. These events are told from the perspective of Jane in the book “Music to Move the Stars” (2007), which was later updated to the “Theory of Everything” and from the perspective of Hawking in “My Brief History” (2013). There were two other women in his life - Personal Assistant Judy Fella and his own sister Philippa Hufton (71).
His was a unique life. Part celebrity, part scientist, part family man, his greatest contribution to modern society was that he got more young and old people interested in science. During a recent interview, Hawking urged more people to take an interest in science, claiming that there would be ‘serious consequences’ if this did not happen.
In the words of Hawking: “Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”