Stephen Hawking was born January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. From an early age, he showed a passion for science and the sky. At age 21, while studying cosmology at Cambridge, Hawking was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). Despite his debilitating illness, he has done ground-breaking work in physics and cosmology and his several books strive to make science accessible to everyone.
The eldest of Frank and Isobel Hawking's four children, Stephen William Hawking was born on the 300th anniversary of the death of
Galileo, which has long been a source of pride for the noted physicist. Stephen was born into a family of thinkers. At a time when few women thought of going to college, the Scottish-born Isobel earned her way into Oxford University in the 1930s, making her one of the college's first female students. Frank Hawking, another Oxford graduate, was a respected medical researcher with a specialty in tropical diseases.
Stephen Hawking's birth came at an inopportune time for his parents, who didn't have much money. The political climate was also tense, as England was dealing with World War II and the onslaught of German bombs. In an effort to seek a safer place to have their first child, Frank moved his pregnant wife from their London home to Oxford. The Hawkings would go on to have two other children, Mary (1943) and Philippa (1947). A second son, Edward, was adopted in 1956.
The Hawkings, as one close family friend described them, were an "eccentric" bunch. Dinner was often eaten in silence, each of the Hawkings intently reading a book. The family car was an old London taxi, and their home in St. Albans was a three-story fixer-upper that never quite got fixed. The Hawkings also kept bees in the basement and made fireworks in the greenhouse.
In 1950, Stephen's father took work as the head of the Division of Parasitology at the National Institute of Medical Research, and spent the winter months in Africa doing research. He wanted his eldest child to go into medicine, but from an early age Stephen showed a passion for science and the sky. That was evident to his mother, who, along with her children, often stretched out in the backyard on summer evenings to stare up at the stars. "Stephen always had a strong sense of wonder," she remembered. "And I could see that the stars would draw him."
Early in his academic life Stephen, while recognized as bright, was not an exceptional student. At one point in high school, his mother recalled, he was third from the bottom of his class. Instead, Stephen turned his mind loose on pursuits outside of school. He loved board games, and with a few close friends created new games of their own. At the age of 16 Stephen, along with several buddies, constructed a computer out of recycled parts for solving rudimentary mathematical equations.
He was also on the go a lot. "Always on the move," said a family friend. "Hardly ever still." With his sister Mary, Stephen, who loved to climb, devised different entry routes
into the family home. He remained active even after he entered Oxford University at the age of 17. He loved to dance, and also took an interest in rowing, becoming one of the Oxford rowing team's coxswain.
While Stephen first began to notice problems with his physical health at Oxford—on occasion he would trip and fall, or slur his speech— he didn't look into the problem until 1963, during his first year at Cambridge. For the most part, Hawking had kept these minor symptoms to himself. But when his father took notice of the condition, he sent Stephen to see a doctor. For the next two weeks, the 21-year-old college student made his home at a medical clinic, where he underwent a series of tests.
"They took a muscle sample from my arm, stuck electrodes into me, and injected some radio opaque fluid into my spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays, as they tilted the bed," he said. "After all that, they didn't tell me what I had, except that it was not multiple sclerosis, and that I was an a-typical case."
Eventually, however, doctors did inform the Hawkings about what was ailing their son: He was in the early stages of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS or
Lou Gehrig's disease). In a very simple sense, the nerves that controled his muscles were shutting down. Doctors gave him two and a half years to live.
It was devastating news for Stephen and his family. A few events, however, prevented him from becoming completely despondent. The first of these came while Hawking was still in the hospital. There, he shared a room with a boy suffering from leukemia. Relative to what his roommate was going through, Stephen reflected later, his situation seemed more tolerable. Not long after he was released from the hospital, Hawking had a dream that he was going to be executed. He said this dream made him realize that there were still things to do with his life.
But the most significant change in his life was the fact that he was in love. At a New Year's party in 1963, shortly before he had been diagnosed with ALS, Stephen Hawking met a young languages undergraduate named Jane Wilde. They were married in 1965.
In a sense, Hawking's disease helped him become the noted scientist he is today. Before the diagnosis, Stephen Hawking hadn't always focused on his studies. "I was bored with life before my illness," he said. "There had not seemed to be anything worth doing." With the sudden
ealization that he might not even live long enough to earn his Ph.D., Hawking poured himself into his work and research
While physical control over his body diminished (he'd be forced to use a wheelchair by 1969), the effects of his disease started to slow down. In 1968, a year after the birth of his son Robert, Stephen Hawking became a member of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.
The next few years were a fruitful time for Hawking. A daughter, Lucy, was born to Stephen and Jane in 1969 (a third child, Timothy, arrived 10 years later), while Hawking continued with his research. He then published his first book, the highly technical
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (1975). He also teamed up with Penrose to expand upon his friend's earlier work.
In 1974, Stephen Hawking's research turned him into a celebrity within the scientific world when he showed that black holes aren't the information vacuums that scientists had thought they were. In simple terms, Hawking demonstrated that matter, in the form of radiation, can escape the gravitational force of a collapsed star. Hawking Radiation was born.
The announcement sent shock waves of excitement through the scientific world, and put Hawking on a path that's been marked by honors, notoriety and distinguished titles. He was named a fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 32, and later earned the prestigious
Albert Einstein Award. In 1975 he journeyed to Rome, where he was honored with the Pius XI Gold Medal for Science from Pope Paul VI.
Teaching stints followed, too. One was at Caltech at Pasadena, California, where Hawking served as visiting professor for a year. Another was at Gonville & Caius College in Cambridge, England. In 1979, Hawking found himself back at Cambridge University, where he was named to one of teaching's most renowned posts: the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. Dating back to 1663, the position has been held by just 14 other people, including Sir
Isaac Newton.
Hawking's ever-expanding career was accompanied, however, by his ever-worsening physical state. By the mid-1970s, the Hawking family had taken in one of Stephen's graduate students to help manage his care and work. He could still feed himself and get out of bed, but virtually everything else required assistance. In addition, his speech had become increasingly slurred, so that only those who knew him well could understand him. In 1985 he lost his voice for good following a tracheotomy. The resulting situation required 24-hour nursing care for the acclaimed physicist.
It also put in peril Hawking's ability to do his work. The predicamentaught the attention of a California computer programmer, who had developed a speaking program that could be directed by head or eye movement. The invention allowed Hawking to select words on a computer screen that were then passed through a speech synthesizer. At the time of its introduction, Hawking, who still had use of his fingers, selected his words with a handheld clicker. Today, with virtually all control of his body gone
Hawking directs the program through a cheek muscle attached to a sensor.
Through the program, and the help of assistants, Stephen Hawking has continued to write at a prolific rate. His work has included numerous scientific papers, of course, but also information for the non-scientific community.
In 1988 Hawking, a recipient of the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, catapulted to international prominence with the publication of A Brief History of Time. The short, informative book became an account of cosmology for the masses. The work was an instant success, spending more than four years atop the London Sunday Times' best-seller list. Since its publication, it has sold more than 25 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages. But it also wasn't as easy to understand as some had hoped. So in 2001, Hawking followed up his book with The Universe in a Nutshell, which offered a more illustrated guide to cosmology's big theories. Four years later, he authored the even more accessible A Briefer History of Time.
Together the books, along with Hawking's own research and papers, articulate the physicist's personal search for science's Holy Grail: a single unifying theory that can combine cosmology (the study of the big) with quantum mechanics (the study of the small) to explain how the universe began. It's this kind of ambitious thinking that has allowed Hawking, who claims he can think in 11 dimensions, to lay out some big possibilities for humankind. He's convinced that time travel is possible, and that humans may indeed colonize other planets in the future.
