Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking (1942–2018)

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo, a coincidence he enjoyed noting. His father, Frank, was a research biologist specializing in tropical diseases; his mother, Isobel, had studied at Oxford. The family moved to St Albans, north of London, where Hawking attended St Albans School. He was an unremarkable student by his own account, untidy and slow to read, but his friends nicknamed him Einstein, and he built elaborate games and a crude computer from salvaged parts. He wanted to study mathematics; his father urged medicine. They settled on physics at University College, Oxford, where, by his own later admission, he did very little work, rowing as a coxswain and doing perhaps an hour of study a day. He took a first-class degree, narrowly, after an oral examination in which 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 went to Cambridge in 1962 to study cosmology, and within a year noticed that his body was failing him. In early 1963, at twenty-one, he was diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease, usually identified as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and told he had perhaps two years to live. He fell into depression and, for a time, drank heavily and read Wagner. What turned him was partly a dream of being executed, which convinced him there was something worth doing if he were reprieved, and partly his engagement to Jane Wilde, whom he married in 1965. The disease progressed far more slowly than predicted, but it did progress. He moved from walking sticks to a wheelchair, and after a bout of pneumonia and a tracheotomy in 1985 he lost his natural voice entirely. Thereafter he communicated through a computer and speech synthesizer, controlled at first by a hand switch and eventually by a sensor in his cheek, in the flat American-accented voice that became inseparable from his public identity.

His working life was spent almost entirely at Cambridge. He completed his doctorate in 1966, held a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, and in 1979 was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the chair once held by Isaac Newton. He held it for thirty years. His early work with Roger Penrose applied singularity theorems to the universe's origin; in 1974, he showed that black holes are not wholly black but emit radiation, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at thirty-two. He travelled widely, lectured at the Vatican, and in 1988 became famous far beyond physics with A Brief History of Time.

The cost fell on those closest to him. His marriage to Jane, who raised their three children and cared for him through the worst of his decline while sustaining a faith he did not share, ended in 1990, strained by the demands of his illness, his fame, and the arrival of nurses and assistants into their household. Jane, a committed Anglican, later wrote candidly of those years. He married his nurse Elaine Mason in 1995; the marriage ended in 2006, amid allegations, investigated by police and never substantiated, that he was being mistreated. He reconciled with Jane and the children in his later years. He was also open about his refusal of religion, describing himself as an atheist, and saying that he regarded heaven as a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

He carried on working, flew in zero gravity in 2007, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. He died at his home in Cambridge on March 14, 2018, the anniversary of Einstein's birth, and was buried in Westminster Abbey near the graves of Newton and Darwin.

His Writing and Its Influence

Hawking's scientific papers, beginning in the mid-1960s, were technical work in general relativity and quantum theory, read by specialists. The early singularity theorems, developed with Roger Penrose, argued that if general relativity holds, the universe must have begun in a state of infinite density. The 1974 paper on black hole radiation, published in Nature, joined gravity, thermodynamics and quantum mechanics in a single result and remains his most secure scientific legacy. Later he turned to the question of whether the universe needed a beginning at all. With James Hartle he proposed in 1983 a "no-boundary" model in which time, run backward, curves smoothly away rather than reaching a first instant. He also spent decades on the black hole information paradox, and reversed his own position on it in 2004 after a famous bet with the physicist John Preskill.

A Brief History of Time (1988) carried these questions to a general audience and sold in the tens of millions. It was written, he said, partly because he needed the income. It later spawned The Universe in a Nutshell and a further popular volume, The Grand Design, written with Leonard Mlodinow in 2010. The 1988 book closed with a sentence that Christian readers have quoted ever since: that if we discover a complete theory, we would "know the mind of God." Hawking used the phrase as a figure of speech, and he later said plainly that he meant no personal deity. In The Grand Design he went further and argued that physical law, together with the spontaneous appearance of universes from quantum fluctuation, made a creator unnecessary. His last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published after his death, states his atheism outright.

Christian writers answered him in several ways. The most direct reply came from philosophers and theologians who held that the no-boundary proposal, even if correct, left untouched the question of why there is a universe with laws at all. They took up Hawking's own question, "What breathes fire into the equations?", from A Brief History of Time. John Lennox, an Oxford mathematician, wrote God and Stephen Hawking in reply to The Grand Design, arguing that Hawking confused explanation by law with explanation of the law. Others, among them the physicist and priest John Polkinghorne, treated his work with more sympathy, accepting the science while resisting the metaphysical conclusions drawn from it. Catholic readers noted that the same cosmological theories had been received with warmth at the Vatican, where Pope John Paul II had advised physicists in the 1980s against inquiring into the moment of creation itself, a counsel Hawking later recalled with amusement.

The wider influence is harder to measure. Hawking helped make cosmology a subject of ordinary conversation, and the question of origins, which many Christians had thought safely theirs, returned to public argument with a scientific vocabulary. His life, a mind of such range inside a body so constrained, also struck many believers as a kind of parable, though he would have refused that reading.

Who should read Hawking: Readers of this library who want to understand the scientific challenge to theism as its most capable popular voice put it, rather than as it appears in caricature. He is useful for those who have been handed apologetic answers to cosmology without having read the questions, and for anyone whose faith will meet a physicist's skepticism across a table. A Brief History of Time is the right place to begin. He is not a guide to prayer or to the knowledge of God, and he did not intend to be. He is for readers willing to be argued with by an honest unbeliever.