Stephen Hawking: A Life in Five Chapters

Chapter 1 · The Lazy Undergraduate

Oxford, boredom, and a diagnosis at twenty-one

1942 – 1963 · Oxford · St Albans · Cambridge

Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942 — a date he liked to point out was three hundred years after Galileo's death. His father was a tropical medicine researcher; the family was eccentric and bookish, known locally for reading at the dinner table and driving a converted London taxi.

At St Albans School he was nicknamed Einstein without being top of the class, and with friends built a simple logic-gate computer from clock parts and telephone switchboard components.

He went to University College, Oxford, at seventeen to read physics, and found it too easy to be interesting. He estimated later that he had done about a thousand hours of work in three years, roughly an hour a day. He coxed a rowing eight, largely for the social life. His examination result fell on the boundary between a first and a second, and at the viva he told the examiners that if they gave him a first he would go to Cambridge, and if a second he would stay at Oxford. He got the first.

He went to Cambridge in 1962 to do a doctorate in cosmology, disappointed to be assigned Dennis Sciama rather than Fred Hoyle. It turned out to be fortunate: Sciama was an outstanding supervisor at the centre of British relativity.

During his first year he became clumsy, fell on stairs, and began slurring words. In early 1963, aged twenty-one, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and told he had about two years. He fell into a depression, and then, by his own account, into a strange elation — nothing seemed worth doing except the work.

Why this matters

Hawking's own account is that the diagnosis made him productive: with the expectation of a short life, he stopped wasting time on anything but physics.

You have the student and the diagnosis. What would you ask him?

Ask Stephen

• “Why did you do so little work at Oxford?”
• “What did you say to the examiners at your viva?”
• “How did the diagnosis change what you did with your time?”
• “What did Dennis Sciama give you as a supervisor?”
• “What did building a computer from clock parts teach you?”

Chapter 2 · The Universe Had a Beginning

Singularity theorems with Roger Penrose

1965 – 1970 · Cambridge · London

Hawking married Jane Wilde in 1965. She has written frankly about what the following decades required of her, and about the strain that a role combining wife, nurse and support staff placed on the marriage.

His doctoral work took an idea from Roger Penrose and turned it inside out. Penrose had proved that when a sufficiently massive star collapses, general relativity necessarily produces a singularity — a point where density becomes infinite and the equations break down. Hawking realised that if you run the argument backwards in time and apply it to an expanding universe, you get the same conclusion at the start: the universe must have begun in a singularity.

This mattered because the steady-state theory, championed by Fred Hoyle, held that the universe had no beginning and matter was continuously created. Hawking presented an early version of the argument at a lecture where Hoyle was present and, in Hawking's telling, contradicted him publicly to Hoyle's fury.

The discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1964–65 had already made the Big Bang the favoured model. The Hawking–Penrose theorems, published between 1965 and 1970, showed it was not merely favoured by observation but required by general relativity itself, unless the theory breaks down — which is precisely what most physicists now think happens, because quantum effects must matter at that scale.

By the late 1960s Hawking was using a wheelchair and could no longer write equations by hand. He developed an unusual capacity to manipulate complex geometry mentally, in pictures rather than symbols.

Why this matters

The singularity theorems established that a beginning is not an optional extra in general relativity but a consequence of it — the point at which cosmology needed a quantum theory of gravity.

You have the beginning of the universe. What would you ask him?

Ask Stephen

• “What is a singularity, and why does it matter?”
• “How did you turn Penrose's argument around in time?”
• “What was the steady-state theory, and why did it lose?”
• “How did you do mathematics without being able to write?”
• “What did Jane Hawking's support actually involve?”

Chapter 3 · Black Holes Are Not Black

The calculation he expected to disprove

1971 – 1975 · Cambridge · Moscow · Oxford

Hawking's central result began as an attempt to refute someone else. Jacob Bekenstein had proposed that a black hole has entropy proportional to the area of its event horizon. Hawking thought this was wrong, because anything with entropy has a temperature, and anything with a temperature radiates — and nothing was supposed to escape a black hole.

When he did the calculation, applying quantum field theory to the curved spacetime near a horizon, the radiation was there. In 1974 he published the result: black holes emit thermal radiation, now called Hawking radiation, at a temperature inversely proportional to their mass. Small black holes are hotter and evaporate faster; over immense timescales, a black hole radiates away entirely.

One way to picture it is that pairs of virtual particles constantly appear in the vacuum; near the horizon one can fall in while the other escapes, and the energy is drawn from the hole's mass. Hawking used the picture himself while noting it is a rough analogy for the actual calculation.

The significance is that it is the first result to combine general relativity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics — the three great theories that otherwise refuse to fit together. It is why physicists believe black hole thermodynamics is a genuine clue to a quantum theory of gravity.

It also created the black hole information paradox: if a black hole evaporates completely, what happens to the information about everything that fell in? Quantum mechanics says information cannot be destroyed. Hawking argued for years that it was lost, then conceded a bet in 2004 and accepted it is preserved. The question is not fully settled.

“Black holes ain't so black.”

— Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 1988 (chapter title)

Why this matters

Hawking radiation is the only known result to combine gravity, quantum mechanics and thermodynamics — and the information paradox it created is one of the central unsolved problems in theoretical physics.

You have the result that made his name. What would you ask him?

Ask Stephen

• “How can anything escape a black hole?”
• “Why did you start out trying to prove Bekenstein wrong?”
• “What is the information paradox?”
• “Why did you concede the bet in 2004?”
• “Why does combining three theories matter so much?”

Chapter 4 · The Voice

A tracheostomy, a synthesiser, and a bestseller

1979 – 1990 · Cambridge · Geneva

Hawking was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1979 — the chair once held by Newton — and held it for thirty years.

In 1985, in Geneva, he contracted pneumonia and was placed on a ventilator. Doctors offered to switch it off; Jane refused. The tracheostomy that saved his life removed his ability to speak altogether. For a period he could communicate only by having someone point at letter cards while he raised his eyebrows.

A computer program called Equalizer, and a speech synthesiser, restored a voice. He operated it first with a hand switch and later with a cheek muscle sensor, at a rate that fell over the years to around one word a minute. The synthesiser's American accent was never updated, because it had become his; when the hardware became obsolete, engineers kept the original circuitry working.

*A Brief History of Time* was published in 1988. He wrote it to fund his daughter's school fees and his care, and his editor famously warned him that every equation would halve the sales; he kept one, E = mc². It sold more than ten million copies and stayed on the *Sunday Times* bestseller list for 237 weeks, and it is often cited as the most bought and least finished book of its era.

The pressures of that decade broke the marriage. Jane and Stephen separated and divorced in 1995; he married one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, that year, and they divorced in 2006. Both Jane's memoir and his own describe the period with more candour than the public image allowed.

Why this matters

Hawking's speech synthesiser is one of the most influential pieces of assistive technology ever used — and his insistence on keeping its voice changed how a disability aid can become an identity.

You have the voice and the fame. What would you ask him?

Ask Stephen

• “What was it like to lose your voice completely in 1985?”
• “Why did you keep the same synthesised voice?”
• “Why write a book for general readers?”
• “What did communicating at one word a minute do to your thinking?”
• “What did fame cost your family?”

Chapter 5 · Fifty-Five Years

Zero gravity, no boundaries, and Westminster Abbey

1990 – 2018 and after · Cambridge · Florida

Hawking's later scientific work centred on quantum cosmology, particularly the no-boundary proposal developed with James Hartle: the idea that the universe has no initial boundary in time, so asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what lies south of the South Pole. He continued publishing into his final year.

He never received a Nobel Prize, because Hawking radiation has never been observed — the effect is far too faint for any black hole we know of — and the prize is not awarded for unconfirmed theory.

His public life was enormous. He appeared on *Star Trek*, *The Simpsons* and *The Big Bang Theory*, played by his synthesised voice; in 2007 he took a zero-gravity flight, saying he wanted to show that people need not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in spirit. He campaigned repeatedly for the National Health Service, which he credited with keeping him alive.

He also made public statements outside his expertise — on the risks of artificial intelligence, on contacting alien civilisations, on the need to leave Earth — that attracted attention and criticism from specialists in those fields.

He died on 14 March 2018, aged seventy-six, having lived fifty-five years past a two-year prognosis. The date was Einstein's birthday. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey between Newton and Darwin, and the memorial stone carries the equation for the temperature of a black hole.

Why this matters

Hawking survived motor neurone disease for over half a century, which is medically exceptional, and used the visibility it gave him to argue that physical limitation need not determine a life.

You have fifty-five years past a two-year prognosis. What would you ask him?

Ask Stephen

• “What does 'no boundary' mean for the beginning of the universe?”
• “Why did you never win a Nobel Prize?”
• “Why take a zero-gravity flight?”
• “Were you right to speak publicly about artificial intelligence?”
• “What should be written on your memorial?”

What Stephen changed

Hawking's singularity theorems with Penrose showed that general relativity implies the universe began in a singularity, and Hawking radiation established black hole thermodynamics as the leading clue to a quantum theory of gravity. A Brief History of Time brought cosmology to a mass audience and made him the most publicly recognisable scientist of his generation.

A debate that continues

Physicists still debate the resolution of the black hole information paradox that his work created, and commentators disagree about whether his public statements on artificial intelligence and space colonisation extended his authority beyond his expertise.

Keep exploring — ask Stephen

• “What is the most important question cosmology has not answered?”
• “How did you check your reasoning without writing anything down?”
• “What did you want people who read your book to take from it?”

Related lives

• Albert Einstein — Nobel Laureate · Author of Relativity
• Isaac Newton — Lucasian Professor · President of the Royal Society
• J. Robert Oppenheimer — Father of the Atomic Bomb

Related themes

Black holes and cosmology · The Big Bang · Science communication