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Stephen William Hawking,
CH,
CBE,
FRS,
FRSA (born 8 January 1942)[1]
is a British
theoretical physicist and
cosmologist, whose scientific career spans over forty years.
His
books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and
he is an
Honorary Fellow of the
Royal Society of Arts,[2]
a lifetime member of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences,[3]
and in 2009 was awarded the
Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the
United States.[4]
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.[5][6]
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.[7]
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.[8][9]
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).[10]
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.[11]
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.)[12]
According to Hawking, a German
V-2
missile struck only a few streets away.[13]
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.[11]
In 1950, Hawking and his family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire,
where he attended
St Albans High School for Girls from 1950 to 1953. (At that
time, boys could attend the Girls' school until the age of ten.)[14]
From the age of eleven, he attended
St Albans School, where he was a good, but not exceptional,
student.[11]
When asked later to name a teacher who had inspired him, Hawking
named his mathematics teacher
Dikran Tahta.[15]
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.[11]
Inspired by his mathematics teacher, he originally wanted to study
the subject at university. However, Hawking's father wanted him to
apply to
University College, Oxford, where his father had attended. As
University College did not have a mathematics fellow at that time,
it would not accept applications from students who wished to read
that discipline. Hawking therefore applied to read natural sciences,
in which he gained a scholarship. Once at University College,
Hawking specialised in
physics.[12]
His interests during this time were in
thermodynamics,
relativity, and
quantum mechanics. His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said
in
The New York Times Magazine:
It was only necessary for him to know that something could be
done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people
did it. [...] He didn't have very many books, and he didn't take
notes. Of course, his mind was completely different from all of
his contemporaries.[11]
Hawking was passing, but his unimpressive study habits 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:
And of course the examiners then were intelligent enough to
realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most
of themselves.[11]
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.[11]
He left Oxford for
Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he engaged in the study of
theoretical astronomy and
cosmology.
Career in theoretical physics
Almost as soon as he arrived at Cambridge, he started developing
symptoms of
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, known colloquially in the
United States as
Lou Gehrig's disease), a type of
motor neurone disease which would cost him almost all
neuromuscular control. During his first two years at Cambridge, he
did not distinguish himself, but, after the disease had stabilised
and with the help of his doctoral tutor,
Dennis William Sciama, he returned to working on his Ph.D.[11]
Hawking was elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the
Royal Society in 1974, was created a Commander of the
Order of the British Empire in 1982, and became a
Companion of Honour in 1989. Hawking is a member of the Board of
Sponsors of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
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.[16]
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.[17]
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.[18]
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.[19]
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.[20]
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."[21]
Losing an old
bet
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.[22]
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.[23]
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.[24]
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,[25]
Hawking was quoted before the flight saying:
Many people have asked me why I am taking this flight. I am
doing it for many reasons. First of all, I believe that life on
Earth is at an ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a
disaster such as sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered
virus, or other dangers. I think the human race has no future if
it doesn't go into space. I therefore want to encourage public
interest in space.[26]
In an interview with
The Daily Telegraph, he suggested that space was the Earth's
long term hope.[27]
He continued this theme at a 2008 Charlie Rose interview.[28]
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.[29]
"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.[30]
Illness
Stephen Hawking is severely disabled by a
motor neuron 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.[31]
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.[32]
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.[33]
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.[34]
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."[35]
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.[36][37]
The following day, it was reported that his new condition is
"comfortable" and he should make a full recovery from the infection.[38]
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 "Descent"
of
Star Trek: The Next Generation, appeared in a skit on
Late Night with Conan O'Brien, and appeared on the
Discovery Channel special Alien Planet.[39]
He has also played himself in several episodes of
The Simpsons and
Futurama. 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
Sebastian 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.[40]
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.[41]
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.[42]
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.[43]
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
most recent 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.[44]
Awards and
honours
Personal life
Hawking revealed that he did not see much point in obtaining a
doctorate if he were to die soon. Hawking later said that the real
turning point was his 1965 marriage to Jane Wilde, a language
student.[11]
After gaining his Ph.D. at
Trinity Hall, Stephen became first a Research Fellow, and later
on a Professorial Fellow at
Gonville and Caius College.
Jane Hawking (née Wilde), Hawking's first wife, cared for him
until 1991 when the couple separated, reportedly because of the
pressures of fame and his increasing disability. They had three
children: Robert (b. 1967),
Lucy (b. 1969), and Timothy (b. 1979).
Hawking then married his
nurse, Elaine Mason (who was previously married to David Mason, the
designer of the first version of Hawking's talking computer), in
1995. In October 2006, Hawking filed for divorce from his second
wife.[48]
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.[49]
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."[50]
Religious views
Hawking has repeatedly used the word "God" (in metaphorical
meanings)[51]
to illustrate points made in his books and public speeches.
His
ex-wife, Jane said during their divorce proceedings that he was an
atheist.[52][53]
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."[54]
Hawking compared religion and science in 2010, saying: "There is
a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on
authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason.
Science will win because it works."[55]
On September 2010, The Telegraph reported, "Stephen Hawking has
declared that his latest work shows there was no creator of the
universe" and that the new m-theory "accounts for the birth
of the universe...and replaces the need for religious accounts in
Hawking's mind."[56]
Hawking wrote in his new book
The Grand Design that "Because there is a law such as
gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.
Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than
nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary
to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe
going."[57][58]
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
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.
Films and series
A list of Hawking's publications through the year 2002 is
available on his
website.
See also
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