Stephen Hawking

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Stephen Hawking
Professor Stephen William Hawking
Born	8 January 1942 Oxford, UK
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of Oxford, University of Cambridge
Known for	Black holes, theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity
Spouse(s)	Jane Wilde (m. 1965; div. 1990), Elaine Mason (m. 1995)
Children	Robert (b. 1967), Lucy (b. 1970), Timothy (b. 1979)
Awards	Eddington Medal (1975), Hughes Medal (1976), Albert Einstein Medal (1979), Wolf Prize (1988), Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize (1999), Copley Medal (2006)
Scientific career
Fields	Physicist
Institutions	University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Dennis Sciama
Doctoral students	Harvey Reall, Tim Prestidge, Raymond Laflamme, Julian Luttrell, Bruce Allen

Website	Stephen Hawking's homepage

Stephen William Hawking CH, CBE, FRS, is considered one of the world's leading theoretical physicists. Hawking is the Lucasian Professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a post once held by Sir Isaac Newton), and a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

Despite enduring severe disability and, of late, being rendered quadriplegic by motor neurone disease (specifically, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig's disease), he has had a successful career for many years, and has achieved status as an academic celebrity.

Biography

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on 8 January, 1942 to Frank and Isobel Hawking. He had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward.

Hawking's parents moved from North London to Oxford for Stephen's birth because it was safer since London was at that time under German bombardment. After the birth they moved back to London. Hawking's sister, eighteen months younger than him, was born there, by which time the bombing had subsided.

In 1950 Hawking and his family moved to St Albans where, from the age of 11, he attended St Albans School in Hertfordshire. He applied to study mathematics at University College, Oxford, but ended up studying physics there instead. He read for his Ph.D. at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Today, he holds the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Gonville & Caius College.

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.

Research fields

Hawking's principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity. In 1971, in collaboration with Sir Roger Penrose, he proved the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a 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.

Hawking also suggested that, after the Big Bang, primordial or 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 as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.

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; while one cannot travel North of the North pole, there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed Universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realization that the no-boundary proposal is consistent with a Universe which is not closed also.

Illness

Hawking is severely disabled by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (a type of motor neurone disease commonly known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's disease).

When he was young, he was athletic (although Hawking's biography on his official website would seem to refute this) and enjoyed riding horses and playing with the other children. At Oxford, he coxed a rowing team, which, he stated, helped relieve his immense boredom at university. Symptoms of the disorder first appeared while he was enrolled at Cambridge. He lost balance and fell downstairs, hitting his head. Worried of losing his genius, he took the Mensa International test, to verify that his intellectual abilities were intact. Diagnosis came when Hawking was 21, shortly before his first marriage, and doctors said he would not survive more than two or three years. He battled the odds and has survived much longer than most sufferers of ALS, although he has become increasingly disabled by the gradual progress of the disease.

He gradually lost the use of his arms, legs, and voice, and is now almost completely paralysed. The computer system attached to his wheelchair is operated by Hawking via an infra-red 'blink switch' clipped onto his glasses. By scrunching his right cheek up, he is able to talk, compose speeches, research papers, browse the World Wide Web and write e-mail. The system also uses radio transmission to provide control over doors in his home and office.

He has used an electronic voice synthesizer to communicate since a tracheostomy in 1985 that followed severe pneumonia. The voice synthesizer, which has an American accent, is of a model that is no longer 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 because he identifies with it. Hawking is said to be looking for a replacement since, other than being obsolete, the synthesizer, a DECtalk DTC01 is now considered large and fragile but as of present, finding a software alternative has been difficult. During a lecture in Hong Kong in June 2006, he joked that if he got a new one with a French accent, his wife would divorce him.

When Hawking (then using a wheelchair and unable to dress himself) and his wife were first living together, they received no outside assistance other than physics students, who helped in exchange for extra attention with their work. As his condition worsened, Hawking needed a team of nurses to provide round-the-clock care. He also needed a wheelchair that would help him not be distracted by his disability.

Despite his disease, he describes himself as "lucky" — not only has the slow progress of his disease provided time to make influential discoveries, it has also afforded time to have, in his own words, "a very attractive family". When Jane was asked why she decided to marry a man with a 3-year life expectancy, she responded: "These were the days of atomic gloom and doom, so we all had rather a short life expectancy."

Hawking's wife cared for him until 1991, when the couple separated under the pressures of fame, his increasing disability, and the consequent need to employ round-the-clock nurses, one of whom he became involved with. He and his nurse, Elaine Mason, were married in 1995. (Elaine Mason's first husband, David Mason, had designed the first version of Hawking's talking computer.) A 2004 Vanity Fair article by Judy Bachrach contains allegations of violence between the couple that were made by his first family, though a police investigation in the same year ended inconclusively.

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. The Hawkings' daughter Lucy Hawking is a novelist. Their son Robert Hawking emigrated to the United States, married, and has one child, George Edward.

Distinction

Hawking's belief that the average 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 April 1, 1988, and became a documentary in 1991 starring 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. He has now written a new book, A Briefer History of Time (2005) that aims to update his earlier works and make them accessible to a wider audience. He has recently announced that he plans to write a children's book focusing on science that has been described to be "like Harry Potter, but without the magic."

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 the phrase "Whenever I hear the word culture... I release the safety-catch of my Browning !", from a 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 is an active supporter of various causes. He appeared on a political broadcast for the United Kingdom's Labour Party, and actively supports the children's charity SOS Children's Villages UK.

He recently made the news for announcing that he believes colonization on other planets and/or the moon is imperative to ensure the continuation of the human race.

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 thusly 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. (For further detail see Thorne Hawking Preskill bet)

One other bet — about the existence of black holes — was described by Hawking as an "insurance policy" of sorts. To quote from his book, A Brief History of Time, "This was a form of insurance policy for me. I have done a lot of work on black holes, and it would all be wasted if it turned out that black holes do not exist. But in that case, I would have the consolation of winning my bet, which would win me four years of the magazine Private Eye. If black holes do exist, Kip will get one year of Penthouse. When we made the bet in 1975, we were 80% certain that Cygnus was a black hole. By now, I would say that we are about 95% certain, but the bet has yet to be settled." (1988) According to the updated 10th anniversary edition of A Brief History of Time, Hawking has conceded the bet "to the outrage of Kip's liberated wife" due to subsequent observational data in favour of black holes.

Hawking had earlier speculated that the singularity at the centre of a black hole could form a bridge to a "baby universe" into which the lost information could pass; such theories have been very popular in science fiction. But according to Hawking's new idea, presented at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, on 21 July, 2004 in Dublin, Ireland, black holes eventually transmit, in a garbled form, information about all matter they swallow:

The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

—GR Conference website summary of Hawking's talk

Having concluded that information is conserved, Hawking conceded his bet in Preskill's favour, awarding him Total Baseball, The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia, an encyclopedia from which information is easily retrieved. However, Thorne remains unconvinced of Hawking's proof and declined to contribute to the award.

Awards

1975 Eddington Medal
1976 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society
1979 Albert Einstein Medal
1982 Order of the British Empire (Commander)
1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
1986 Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
1988 Wolf Prize in Physics
1989 Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord
1999 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society
2003 Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University
2006 Copley Medal of the Royal Society

Publications

Technical

The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with George Ellis
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

A Brief History of Time, (Bantam Press 1988)
Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, (Bantam Books 1993)
The Universe in a Nutshell, (Bantam Press 2001)
On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy, (Running Press 2002)
A Briefer History of Time, (Bantam Books 2005)

N.B. 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.

Full lists of Hawking's publications are available on his website.

Popular culture

Main article: Stephen Hawking in Popular culture

List of former students

Fay Dowker	1987–1990
Bruce Allen	1980–1983
Malcolm Perry	1974–1978
Bernard J. Carr	1972–1975
Gary Gibbons	1970–1972

Notes and references

"SOS Children's Villages - Our Friends". Retrieved 2006-05-06.

Boslough, John (1985). Stephen Hawking's Universe. New York: Avon Books. ISBN 0-380-70763-2. A layman's guide to Stephen Hawking.
Ferguson, Kitty (1991). Stephen Hawking: Quest For A Theory of Everything. Franklin Watts. ISBN 0553-29895-X.
A Brief History of Time (Documentary). 1991. {{cite AV media}}: Unknown parameter |director= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |distributor= ignored (|publisher= suggested) (help)
Hawking, S. W. & Ellis, G. F. R. (1973). The Large Scale Structure of Space-time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-09906-4.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link). Highly influential in the field.
Hawking, S. W. & Israel, W. (1979). General relativity: an Einstein centenary survey. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22285-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link). A much cited centennial survey.
Misner, Charles; Thorne, Kip S. & Wheeler, John Archibald (1973). Gravitation. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-0344-0.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link); see Box 34.3 for a short biography. (This famous book is the first modern textbook on general relativity, and shows that even in the early seventies, Hawking was already regarded as an unusually intriguing personality by his colleagues.)

Quotes

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.
My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.
Not only does God play dice, but... he sometimes throws them where they cannot be seen.
Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?
The whole history of science has been the gradual realisation that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.
There are grounds for cautious optimism that we may now be near the end of the search for the ultimate laws of nature.
To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
(While looking at the Warp core on the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation) I'm working on that.
For millions of years mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk. (also used by Pink Floyd on the song Keep Talking)
It was my idea.
When I hear of Schrödinger's cat, I reach for my gun.