Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author whose work belonged to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but whose questions reached back to the beginning of the universe. Born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, he became director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. From 1979 to 2009, he held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post widely viewed as one of the most prestigious in the academic world.

Hawking grew up in a family shaped by learning and science. His father, Frank, read medicine at Oxford and became a medical researcher specialising in tropical diseases; his mother, Isobel, read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford. Hawking later said he modelled himself on his father, since scientific research seemed to him “the natural thing to do” when one grew up. But he did not want medicine or biology, which he found too inexact and descriptive. He wanted something more fundamental, and found it in physics.

As a boy in St Albans, Hawking was known as “Einstein,” though he was not at first highly successful academically. He enjoyed board games, model aeroplanes and boats, fireworks, and long discussions with friends about Christianity and extrasensory perception. With help from the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, he and his friends built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard, and other recycled components. Inspired by Tahta, Hawking decided to study mathematics, but because University College, Oxford did not offer it at the time, he chose physics and chemistry instead. In 1959, at age 17, he began at University College, Oxford, where he received a first-class BA degree in physics.

In 1962, Hawking began graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. In 1966, he obtained his PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology. Three years earlier, at age 21, he had been diagnosed with an early-onset, slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease. Over decades, it gradually paralysed him. After he lost his speech, he communicated through a speech-generating device, first using a handheld switch and later a single cheek muscle.

Hawking’s scientific work included collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems within general relativity. He also made the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. At first the idea was controversial, but by the late 1970s, after further research, it was widely accepted as a major breakthrough in theoretical physics. He was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained through a union of general relativity and quantum mechanics, supported the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and introduced the notion of a micro black hole.

Hawking also brought cosmology to a broad public. His book A Brief History of Time appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. In 2002, he was ranked number 25 in the BBC’s poll of the 100 Greatest Britons. He died in 2018 at age 76, more than 50 years after his diagnosis. His words still resonate because they join vast questions with human grit: “While there is life, there is hope.”