Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes. He has also achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestsellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
Hawking's key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein–Hawking radiation).
Hawking has a neuro-muscular dystrophy that is related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years and has left him almost completely paralysed.
Early life and education
Stephen Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 to Dr. Frank Hawking, a research
biologist, and Isobel Hawking. He had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward. Though Hawking's parents were living in
North London, they moved to
Oxford while his mother was pregnant with Stephen, desiring a safer location for the birth of their first child. (London was
under attack at the time by the
Luftwaffe.) According to Hawking, a German
V-2 missile struck only a few streets away.
After Hawking was born, the family moved back to London, where his father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. From the age of eleven, he attended St Albans School, where he was a good, but not exceptional, student. He maintains his connection with the school, giving his name to one of the four houses and to an extracurricular science lecture series. He has visited it to deliver one of the lectures and has also granted a lengthy interview to pupils working on the school magazine, The Albanian.
Hawking was always interested in science. resulted in a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honours, making an "oral examination" necessary. Berman said of the oral examination:
After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford in 1962, he stayed to study astronomy. He decided to leave when he found that studying sunspots, which was all the observatory was equipped for, did not appeal to him and that he was more interested in theory than in observation. He continues to have ties with Caltech, spending a month each year there after 1992.
Hawking's achievements were made despite the increasing paralysis caused by the ALS. By 1974, he was unable to feed himself or get out of bed. His speech became slurred so that he could be understood only by people who knew him well. In 1985, he caught pneumonia and had to have a tracheotomy, which made him unable to speak at all. A Cambridge scientist built a device that enables Hawking to write onto a computer with small movements of his body, and then have a voice synthesizer speak what he has typed.
Research fields
Hawking's principal fields of research are
theoretical cosmology and
quantum gravity.
In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity. This led, in 1970, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a gravitational singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.
He supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler's no-hair theorem – namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.
Hawking also suggested upon analysis of gamma ray emissions that after the Big Bang, primordial mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.
In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North Pole: one cannot travel north of the North Pole, as there is no boundary. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-boundary proposal is also consistent with a universe which is not closed.
Along with Thomas Hertog at CERN, in 2006 Hawking proposed a theory of "top-down cosmology," which says that the universe had no unique initial state, and therefore it is inappropriate for physicists to attempt to formulate a theory that predicts the universe's current configuration from one particular initial state. Top-down cosmology posits that in some sense, the present "selects" the past from a superposition of many possible histories. In doing so, the theory suggests a possible resolution of the fine-tuning question: It is inevitable that we find our universe's present physical constants, as the current universe "selects" only those past histories that led to the present conditions. In this way, top-down cosmology provides an anthropic explanation for why we find ourselves in a universe that allows matter and life, without invoking an ensemble of multiple universes.
Hawking's many other scientific investigations have included the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy, the nature of space and time, including the arrow of time, spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian, Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation, gravitational radiation, and wormholes.
At a George Washington University lecture in honour of NASA's fiftieth anniversary, Hawking theorised on the existence of extraterrestrial life, believing that "primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare."
Losing an old bet
talks with Stephen Hawking in the Blue Room of the White House before a ceremony presenting him and fifteen others the Presidential Medal of Freedom on 12 August 2009. The Medal of Freedom is the nation's highest civilian honour.]]
Hawking was in the news in July 2004 for presenting a new theory about black holes which goes against his own long-held belief about their behaviour, thus losing a bet he made with Kip Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech. Classically, it can be shown that information crossing the event horizon of a black hole is lost to our universe, and that thus all black holes are identical beyond their mass, electrical charge and angular velocity (the "no hair theorem"). The problem with this theorem is that it implies the black hole will emit the same radiation regardless of what goes into it, and as a consequence that if a pure quantum state is thrown into a black hole, an "ordinary" mixed state will be returned. This runs counter to the rules of quantum mechanics and is known as the black hole information paradox.
Human spaceflight
At the fiftieth anniversary of
NASA in 2008, Hawking gave a keynote speech on the final frontier exhorting and inspiring the space technology community on why we (the human race) explore space.
At the celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday on 8 January 2007, Hawking announced his plan to take a zero-gravity flight in 2007 to prepare for a sub-orbital spaceflight in 2009 on Virgin Galactic's space service. Billionaire Richard Branson pledged to pay all expenses for the latter, costing an estimated £100,000. Stephen Hawking's zero-gravity flight in a "Vomit Comet" of Zero Gravity Corporation, during which he experienced weightlessness eight times, took place on 26 April 2007. He became the first quadriplegic to float in zero-gravity. This was the first time in forty years that he moved freely, without his wheelchair. The fee is normally US$3,750 for 10–15 plunges, but Hawking was not required to pay the fee. A bit of a futurist, Hawking was quoted before the flight saying: }} In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he suggested that space was the Earth's long term hope. He continued this theme at a 2008 Charlie Rose interview.
Existence and nature of extraterrestrial life
Hawking has indicated that he is almost certain that
alien life exists in other parts of the universe and uses a mathematical basis for his assumptions. "To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like." He believes alien life not only certainly exists on planets but perhaps even in other places, like within stars or even floating in outer space. He also warns that a few of these species might be intelligent and threaten Earth. Contact with such species might be devastating for humanity. "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," he said. He advocated that, rather than try to establish contact, man should try to avoid contact with alien life forms.
Illness
to inaugurate the Laboratory of Astronomy and Particles in Paris and the French release of his work
God Created the Integers]]
Stephen Hawking is severely disabled by a motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Hawking's illness is markedly different from typical ALS in that his form of ALS would make for the most protracted case ever documented. A survival for more than ten years after diagnosis is uncommon for ALS; the longest documented durations are thirty-two and thirty-nine years and these cases were termed benign because of the lack of the typical progressive course.
When he was young, he enjoyed riding horses and playing with other children. At Oxford, he coxed a rowing team, which, he stated, helped relieve his immense boredom at the university. Symptoms of the disorder first appeared while he was enrolled at University of Cambridge; he lost his balance and fell down a flight of stairs, hitting his head. Worried that he would lose his genius, he took the Mensa test to verify that his intellectual abilities were intact. The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21, shortly before his first marriage, and doctors said he would not survive more than two or three years. Hawking gradually lost the use of his arms, legs, and voice, and as of 2009 has been almost completely paralysed.
During a visit to the research centre CERN in Geneva in 1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia, which in his condition was life-threatening as it further restricted his already limited respiratory capacity. He had an emergency tracheotomy, and as a result lost what remained of his ability to speak. He has since used an electronic voice synthesizer to communicate.
The DECtalk DTC01 voice synthesizer he uses, which has an American English accent, is no longer being produced. Asked why he has still kept it after so many years, Hawking mentioned that he has not heard a voice he likes better and that he identifies with it. Hawking is said to be looking for a replacement since, aside from being obsolete, the synthesizer is both large and fragile by current standards. As of mid 2009, he was said to be using NeoSpeech's VoiceText speech synthesizer.
In Hawking's many media appearances, he appears to speak fluently through his synthesizer, but in reality, it is a tedious drawn-out process. Hawking's setup uses a predictive text entry system, which requires only the first few characters in order to auto-complete the word, but as he is only able to use his cheek for data entry, constructing complete sentences takes time. His speeches are prepared in advance, but having a live conversation with him provides insight as to the complexity and work involved. During a Technology, Entertainment, & Design Conference talk, it took him seven minutes to answer a question.
He describes himself as lucky despite his disease. Its slow progression has allowed him time to make influential discoveries and has not hindered him from having, in his own words, "a very attractive family." When his wife, Jane, was asked why she decided to marry a man with a three-year life expectancy, she responded, "Those were the days of atomic gloom and doom, so we all had a rather short life expectancy." On 20 April 2009, Cambridge University released a statement saying that Hawking was "very ill" with a chest infection, and was admitted to Addenbrooke's Hospital. The following day, it was reported that his new condition is "comfortable" and he should make a full recovery from the infection.
As popular science advocate
Hawking has played himself on numerous television shows and has been portrayed in many more. He has played himself on a
Red Dwarf anniversary special, played a hologram of himself on the episode "" of
, appeared in a skit on
Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and appeared on the
Discovery Channel special
Alien Planet. He has also played himself in several episodes of
The Simpsons and
Futurama, and has had an
action figure made of his
Simpsons likeness. When he was portrayed on episodes of
Family Guy, the voice was actually done by a speech synthesizer on a
Macintosh computer, according to DVD commentary. In
The Fairly OddParents, it is mentioned that he was Denzel Croker's college roommate. He has also appeared in an episode of the
Dilbert cartoon. His actual synthesizer voice was used on parts of the
Pink Floyd song "
Keep Talking" from the 1994 album
The Division Bell, as well as on
Turbonegro's "Intro: The Party Zone" on their 2005 album
Party Animals,
Wolfsheim's "Kein Zurück (Oliver Pinelli Mix)". As well as being fictionalised as
nerdcore hip hop artist
MC Hawking, he was impersonated in duet with
Richard Cheese on a cover of "
The Girl Is Mine". In 2008, Hawking was the subject of and featured in the documentary series
Stephen Hawking, Master of the Universe for
Channel 4. He was also portrayed in the movie
Superhero Movie by Robert Joy. In the TV series
Dark Angel Logan's technology savvy colleague is characterised with many similarities to the actual physicist. In September 2008, Hawking presided over the unveiling of the 'Chronophage' (time-eating)
Corpus Clock at Corpus Christi College Cambridge.
Recognition
Acclaim
On 19 December 2007, a statue of Hawking by renowned late artist
Ian Walters was unveiled at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, University of Cambridge. In May 2008, the statue of Hawking was unveiled at the
African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in
Cape Town. The Stephen W. Hawking Science Museum in
San Salvador, El Salvador is named in honour of Stephen Hawking, citing his scientific distinction and perseverance in dealing with adversity. Stephen Hawking Building in Cambridge opened on 17 April 2007. The building belongs to
Gonville and Caius College and is used as an undergraduate accommodation and conference facility.
Distinctions
Hawking's belief that the lay person should have access to his work led him to write a series of popular science books in addition to his academic work. The first of these,
A Brief History of Time, was published on 1 April 1988 by Hawking, his family and friends, and some leading physicists. It surprisingly became a best-seller and was followed by
The Universe in a Nutshell (2001). Both books have remained highly popular all over the world. A collection of essays titled
Black Holes and Baby Universes (1993) was also popular. His book,
A Briefer History of Time (2005), co-written by
Leonard Mlodinow, aims to update his earlier works and make them accessible to an even wider audience. He and his daughter,
Lucy Hawking, have recently published a children's book focusing on science that has been described to be "like
Harry Potter, but without the magic." This book is called
George's Secret Key to the Universe and includes information on
Hawking radiation.
Hawking is also known for his wit; he is famous for his oft-made statement, "When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my pistol." This was a deliberately ironic paraphrase of "Whenever I hear the word culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning", from the play Schlageter (Act 1, Scene 1) by German playwright and Nazi Poet Laureate Hanns Johst. His wit has both entertained the non-specialist public and helped them to understand complex questions. Asked in October 2005 on the British daytime chat show Richard & Judy, to explain his assertion that the question "What came before the Big Bang?" was meaningless, he compared it to asking "What lies north of the North Pole?"
Hawking has generally avoided talking about politics at length, but he has appeared on a political broadcast for the United Kingdom's Labour Party. He supports the children's charity SOS Children's Villages UK.
Awards and honours
1975 Eddington Medal 1976 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society 1979 Albert Einstein Medal 1981 Franklin Medal 1982 Order of the British Empire (Commander) 1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society 1986 Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics 1989 Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord 1989 Companion of Honour 1999
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the
American Physical Society 2003 Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University 2006
Copley Medal of the
Royal Society 2008
Fonseca Price of the
University of Santiago de Compostela 2009
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honour in the United States amid claims by former nurses that she had abused him.
In 1999, Jane Hawking published a memoir, Music to Move the Stars, detailing her own long-term relationship with a family friend whom she later married. Hawking's daughter, Lucy, is a novelist. Their oldest son, Robert, emigrated to the United States, married, and has one child, George Edward Hawking. Reportedly, Hawking and his first family were reconciled in 2007.
Hawking was asked about his IQ in a 2004 newspaper interview, and replied, "I have no idea. People who boast about their I.Q. are losers."
Religious views
In his early work, Hawking spoke of "God" in a metaphorical sense, such as in
A Brief History of Time: "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God." In the same book he suggested the existence of God was unnecessary to explain the origin of the universe. His 2010 book
The Grand Design and interviews with the
Telegraph and the Channel 4 documentary
Genius of Britain, clarify that he does "not believe in a personal God". Hawking writes, "The question is: is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can't understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second." He adds, "Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing."
His ex-wife, Jane said during their divorce proceedings that he was an atheist. Hawking has stated that he is "not religious in the normal sense" and he believes that "the universe is governed by the laws of science. The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws." Hawking compared religion and science in 2010, saying: "There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority [imposed dogma, faith], [as opposed to] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works."
Selected publications
Technical
Singularities in Collapsing Stars and Expanding Universes with Dennis William Sciama, 1969 Comments on Astrophysics and Space Physics Vol 1 #1 The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with George Ellis, 1973 ISBN 0521099064 The Nature of Space and Time with Roger Penrose, foreword by Michael Atiyah, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-691-05084-8 The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Roger Penrose), Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-56330-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-521-65538-2 (paperback), Canto edition: ISBN 0-521-78572-3 Information Loss in Black Holes, Cambridge University Press, 2005 God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History, Running Press, 2005 ISBN 0762419229
Popular
A Brief History of Time, (Bantam Press 1988) ISBN 055305340X Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, (Bantam Books 1993) ISBN 0553374117 The Universe in a Nutshell, (Bantam Press 2001) ISBN 055380202X On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy, (Running Press 2002) ISBN 076241698X A Briefer History of Time, coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, (Bantam Books 2005) ISBN 0553804367 The Grand Design, coauthored with Leonard Mlodinow, (Bantam Press 2010) ISBN 0553805371 Footnote: On Hawking's website, he denounces the unauthorised publication of The Theory of Everything and asks consumers to be aware that he was not involved in its creation.
Children's fiction
These are co-written with his daughter
Lucy.
George's Secret Key to the Universe, (Random House, 2007) ISBN 9780385612708 George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt, (Simon & Schuster, 2009) ISBN 9781416986713
Films and series
A Brief History of Time (1991) Stephen Hawking's Universe (1997) Horizon: The Hawking Paradox (2005)
Masters of Science Fiction (2007) Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe">Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe (2008) Into The Universe with Stephen Hawking (2010) A list of Hawking's publications through the year 2002 is available on his
website.
See also
Basic concepts of quantum mechanics George Ellis Gravitational singularity Many-worlds interpretation, or flexiverse Stephen Hawking in popular culture Susskind–Hawking battle Sydney Selwyn, another distinguished British scientist who suffered from a progressively debilitating illness
References
Further reading
A layman's guide to Stephen Hawking.
Ferguson, Kitty (1991). Stephen Hawking: Quest For A Theory of Everything. Franklin Watts. ISBN 0-553-29895-X. . Highly influential in the field. . A much cited centennial survey.
Pickover, Clifford, Archimedes to Hawking: Laws of Science and the Great Minds Behind Them, Oxford University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0195336115
External links
Stephen Hawking's web site Stephen Hawking's page on Academia.edu TED profile Talks: 2008: Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe Video: Stephen Hawking – discussion of two views of the universe Videos: Stephen Hawking's concept of God, The role of God within the no boundary cosmology and Imaginary time The Life of Stephen Hawking - slideshow by The First Post ;Dated
Stephen Hawking says universe not created by God Public Lectures, including debate with Roger Penrose 1996-2006 Hawking celebrates own brief history">Hawking celebrates own brief history, 7 January 2002, BBC "Leaping the Abyss", interview in Reason by Gregory Benford 2002-04-01 2002-03-24
Black holes turned "inside out", 22 July 2004, BBC">Black holes turned "inside out", 22 July 2004, BBC Return of the time lord">Return of the time lord, Interview about "A Brief History of Time", 27 September 2005, The Guardian. Stephen Hawking touches on God and science – Physicist says Pope John Paul told scientists not to study universe's origins msnbc. com 15 June 2006 Transcript of Stephen Hawking's lecture "The Origin Of The Universe" in the Hebrew University In Jerusalem, 14 December 2006 Press Release from the Catholic League on misquote of Pope by Hawking 2006-06-16 BBC interview 2008-12-05
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