Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on January 8, 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo, a coincidence he enjoyed pointing out. His parents, Frank and Isobel Hawking, had moved from London to Oxford to escape the German bombing raids of the Second World War. Frank was a medical researcher specializing in tropical diseases, and Isobel had studied at Oxford at a time when few women did. The family later settled in St Albans, north of London, where Stephen grew up with two younger sisters, Mary and Philippa, and an adopted brother, Edward ^[1].

The Hawking household prized books and argument over comfort. Friends recalled family dinners where everyone read at the table, and a home cluttered with volumes and a barely functional old car. At St Albans School, Stephen was a capable but not exceptional student, ranked in the middle of his class, though classmates nicknamed him Einstein. He built model aeroplanes and boats and, with friends, assembled a rudimentary computer from clock parts and recycled components, a machine they called LUCE ^[2].

His father wanted him to study medicine, but Stephen was drawn to mathematics and physics. Because University College, Oxford, his father's old college, offered no mathematics degree at the time, he read physics instead. He won a scholarship and entered Oxford in 1959 at the age of 17 ^[1].

Oxford bored him at first. Hawking later estimated that he worked about an hour a day during his undergraduate years, finding the coursework too easy to demand real effort. He rowed as a coxswain, which gave him a social circle, and coasted academically until his final examinations placed him on the borderline between first and second class honours. At an oral examination to settle the matter, he told the examiners that if they awarded him a first he would go to Cambridge for research, and if they gave him a second he would stay at Oxford. They gave him a first ^[2].

He arrived at Cambridge in 1962 to begin doctoral work in cosmology, hoping to study under the astronomer Fred Hoyle but assigned instead to Dennis Sciama, a supervisor who proved an inspired match. Within months, however, Hawking noticed a growing clumsiness: he stumbled, slurred words, and once fell down a staircase. In early 1963, shortly after his 21st birthday, doctors diagnosed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in Britain as motor neurone disease, and suggested he might have roughly two years to live ^[3].

The diagnosis initially plunged him into depression, and he questioned the point of finishing a doctorate he might not live to receive. Two things changed his outlook: the disease progressed more slowly than predicted, and he became engaged to Jane Wilde, a modern languages student he had met at a New Year's party. He later said the engagement gave him something to live for. He returned to his research with new intensity, completing a thesis in 1966 that applied ideas about singularities, points where the equations of general relativity break down, to the universe as a whole ^[3].

Working with the mathematician Roger Penrose, Hawking extended singularity theorems from collapsing stars to cosmology, showing that under general relativity the universe must have begun in a singularity. This work, published in the late 1960s, established him as a serious figure in theoretical physics and earned him a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which remained his academic home for the rest of his life ^[4].

Among all Stephen Hawking achievements, the discovery announced in 1974 towers over the rest. Applying quantum field theory to the curved spacetime around a black hole, he found that black holes are not entirely black: they should emit a faint thermal radiation and slowly lose mass, eventually evaporating altogether. The result, published in the journal Nature under the title "Black hole explosions?", startled physicists because black holes had been defined as objects from which nothing escapes. The predicted emission became known as Hawking radiation, and it remains one of the few concrete results linking quantum mechanics, gravity, and thermodynamics ^[5].

The radiation paper built on earlier work. In 1970 Hawking had proved the area theorem, showing that the total surface area of black hole event horizons can never decrease, a result with a suggestive resemblance to the second law of thermodynamics. Together with Jacob Bekenstein's proposal that black holes carry entropy, Hawking's calculation gave black holes a temperature and turned the analogy into physics. It also opened the black hole information paradox, the still unresolved question of what happens to information swallowed by an evaporating black hole, a puzzle Hawking argued over publicly for decades ^[4].

Recognition followed quickly. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, at 32 one of its youngest members, and in 1979 Cambridge appointed him Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the chair once held by Isaac Newton and Paul Dirac. He held the post until 2009 ^[1]. In the 1980s he and James Hartle proposed the no-boundary condition, a model in which the universe has no initial edge in time, so that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what lies south of the South Pole ^[4].

His reach beyond academia came with A Brief History of Time, published in 1988. Written for readers with no scientific training and famously containing a single equation, E = mc squared, the book spent more than four years on the Sunday Times bestseller list and sold over ten million copies worldwide. It made cosmology a topic of dinner table conversation and made its author a global celebrity ^[6].

Hawking married Jane Wilde in July 1965, and the couple had three children: Robert, born in 1967, Lucy, born in 1970, and Timothy, born in 1979. Jane managed a household organized around a husband whose physical condition deteriorated year by year. By the late 1960s he needed crutches, and by the end of the 1970s he used a wheelchair full time and his speech had become difficult for strangers to understand, so that students and family often interpreted for him ^[3].

A crisis came in 1985, when pneumonia during a visit to Geneva left him near death. Doctors performed a tracheotomy that saved his life but removed what remained of his voice. A California engineer, Walt Woltosz, supplied a program called Equalizer that let Hawking select words on a screen, first with a hand clicker and later, as his hand weakened, with a cheek muscle sensor. Paired with a speech synthesizer built by Speech Plus, it produced the flat, slightly American electronic voice that became inseparable from his public identity. Offered upgrades over the years, he refused to change it, saying it had become his own ^[6].

His first marriage ended in divorce in 1995 after three decades marked by fame, round-the-clock nursing, and growing strain, a period Jane Hawking later described in her memoir Travelling to Infinity, which was adapted into the 2014 film The Theory of Everything. That same year he married Elaine Mason, one of his nurses; the marriage ended in 2006, after which he grew closer again to Jane and to his children and grandchildren ^[3].

Far from retreating, Hawking spent his final decades as a public advocate for science. He wrote or co-wrote further popular books, including The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001, A Briefer History of Time in 2005, and The Grand Design with Leonard Mlodinow in 2010, in which he argued that physical law alone could explain why the universe exists. With his daughter Lucy he wrote a series of children's adventure novels beginning with George's Secret Key to the Universe ^[6].

He embraced popular culture with visible pleasure, appearing as himself in Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Simpsons, Futurama, and The Big Bang Theory. In 2007 he experienced weightlessness aboard a modified Boeing 727 on a parabolic flight, floating free of his wheelchair for the first time in four decades, and he spoke openly of his wish to fly to space ^[7].

Honours accumulated: the Albert Einstein Award, the Wolf Prize, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 2006, and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1989, though he reportedly declined a knighthood. The Nobel Prize eluded him because Hawking radiation, while accepted theoretically, has never been observed directly, and the Nobel committees require experimental confirmation ^[1]. In his last years he warned publicly about existential risks, from unregulated artificial intelligence to climate change, and campaigned in defence of Britain's National Health Service, crediting it with keeping him alive.

Stephen Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on March 14, 2018, at the age of 76, having lived 55 years beyond his diagnosis. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and during the service the European Space Agency beamed a recording of his synthesized voice, set to music, toward the nearest known black hole ^[7].

Any honest Stephen Hawking biography has to weigh two intertwined legacies: the physics and the persona. Within science, Hawking radiation reframed black holes as thermodynamic objects and set the agenda for quantum gravity research. The information paradox it created still drives work on string theory, holography, and the structure of spacetime, and the 2020 Nobel Prize awarded to Roger Penrose for singularity theorems recognized a program of research Hawking had shared in building ^[4].

For the wider public, the question of who was Stephen Hawking has a different answer: a mind that ranged across the cosmos while its body could barely move a cheek muscle. That image, reproduced in films, cartoons, and classrooms, changed public assumptions about disability. Hawking himself was ambivalent about being cast as an inspiration, insisting he was a scientist first, yet he used his visibility to press for accessibility and for disability rights, including narrating a segment at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Paralympic Games ^[7].

Institutions carry his name forward. The Centre for Theoretical Cosmology he founded at Cambridge continues his research program, his archive and the contents of his office went to the Cambridge University Library and the Science Museum in London, and his final co-authored papers on black hole entropy appeared after his death. Among the most repeated Stephen Hawking facts is the simplest one: a man told at 21 to expect two more years instead spent half a century rewriting what humanity knows about the universe ^[1].