The Life of Stephen Hawking

One of the most notable physicists of our time, whose theories about the universe are on par with Einstein’s theories, is Stephen Hawking. Hawking’s life is a fascinating one—both because of his major contributions to science but also because he has been living with ALS, a neurodegenerative disorder, for the past forty-two years. Today, Hawking is completely paralyzed and communicates through a speech-generating device that responds to the blink of his eyelids. Hawking’s life is being explored in the widely acclaimed film, The Theory of Everything, out in theaters this month.

Hawking was born in Oxford, England during WWII and recognized for his eccentricity and brilliance at a young age. In high school he enjoyed manufacturing fireworks, model airplanes, and boats and was known as “Einstein” by his peers.

Hawking began his university education at the University of Oxford at the age of 17. After graduating with a first-class honors degree, he attended the University of Cambridge to study cosmology. But by the age of 21, Hawking contracted motor neuron disease and was given two years to live. Despite his diagnosis, Hawking continued to excel at Cambridge and contributed his ideas to hotly contended theories regarding the origins of the universe: the Big Bang and the Steady State theories.

Using Roger Penrose’s theorem of a spacetime singularity in the center of black holes as a guide, Hawking applied the same thinking to the entire universe, and during 1965 wrote his thesis on this topic. He obtained his PhD degree in 1966, and his essay entitled “Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time” shared top honors with one by Penrose to win that year’s Adams Prize, a prize awarded by Cambridge to first-class research in the area of mathematics.

While Hawking continued to theorize, his physical condition steadily declined. By the late 1960s, he began to use crutches and slowly lost the ability to write. To adjust, he developed compensatory visual methods, including seeing equations in terms of geometry.

The physicist Werner Israel compared the achievements to Mozart composing an entire symphony in his head. Throughout, Hawking remained extremely independent and wanted to be regarded as “a scientist first, popular science writer second, and, in all the ways that matter, a normal human being with the same desires, drives, dreams, and ambitions as the next person.”
By the 1970s, Hawking discovered what became known as the second law of black hole dynamics; that the event horizon of a black hole can never get smaller. In the early 1970s, Hawking’s work with other scientists strongly supported the theorem that no matter what the original material from which a black hole is created it can be completely described by the properties of mass, electrical charge and rotation. His essay titled “Black Holes” won the Gravity Research Foundation Award in January 1971.

Hawking continued to develop interest in physics theories and moved into the study of quantum gravity and quantum mechanics. His work in these areas showed that black holes emit radiation, known today as Hawking Radiation. When Hawking first proposed the theory, it was considered to be controversial but was later regarded as a significant breakthrough in theoretical physics. A few weeks after the announcement of Hawking Radiation, Hawking was invested as a Fellow of the Royal Society—one of the youngest scientists to receive this honor.

As public interest about black holes grew, Hawking was regularly interviewed and he received increasing academic recognition of his work. Despite his prominence as a household name, he contracted pneumonia in the mid 1980s and lost what remained of his speech. Hawking initially raised his eyebrows to choose letters on a spelling card to communicate, but he then received a computer program called the “Equalizer.” In a method he uses to this day, using a switch he selects phrases, words or letters from a bank of about 2500–3000 that are scanned.

One of the first messages Hawking produced with his speech-generating device was a request for his assistant to help him finish writing his widely-recognized popular science work, A Brief History of Time. The book was translated into multiple languages, and ultimately sold an estimated 9 million copies. Media attention was intense, and Newsweek magazine cover and a television special both described him as “Master of the Universe.”

By the 1990s, Hawking’s role as scientific celebrity expanded to include being an advocate and role model for disabled people, including lecturing on the subject and participating in fundraising activities. At the turn of the century, he signed the “Charter for the Third Millennium on Disability” which called on governments to protect disabled rights.

Hawking’s disease-related deterioration has continued, and in 2005 he began to control his communication device with movements of his cheek muscles, with a rate of about one word per minute. For typing, he twitches an eye muscle which allows letters of the alphabet to be selected. Although he can only type 4 letters per minute, he continues to steadfastly pursue his research. It’s truly amazing that a person who has lost the power of speech and movement, can carry out such intricate research with the blink of an eye.

From 1979 to 2009, Hawking held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663. Despite his disabilities, Stephen Hawking has over a dozen honorary degrees and is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.