Reflecting on his achievements during the first thirty-two years of his life, Stephen Hawking must have felt a deep sense of pride in what he had accomplished. The 1970s were the years when he established himself as a world-class physicist, and they marked the beginning of two decades of startling success in the disparate worlds of arcane research and popular writing. Soon after becoming a fellow of the Royal Society, Hawking was invited to spend a year away from Cambridge at Caltech, in Pasadena. The research year, funded by a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholarship, was to study cosmology with the eminent American theoretician Kip Thorne.

Pasadena is a leafy suburb of Los Angeles, nestling up against the San Gabriel Mountains to the northeast of Hollywood. The wide boulevards intersecting the district are lined with grand old houses, and in the heyday of Hollywood it was a favorite haunt of film stars. The main street, Colorado Boulevard, was immortalized in the Jan and Dean song “Little Old Lady from Pasadena,” and there has been no shortage of celebrity names who have taken up resi-

dence there over the decades. However, in the summer Pasadena is one of the smoggiest areas of Los Angeles because the mountains inhibit the escape of ozone. If a Stage 2 Smog Alert is sounded, citizens are advised to stay indoors unless on essential business, and the authorities have the power to make industry and commerce temporarily shut down. Smog alert warnings are broadcast on the radio, and illuminated signs are switched on over freeways. Perhaps the American Indians displayed great powers of premonition, when, long before white men arrived, they named the region “Valley of the Smokes.”

Caltech itself is unique in that, for such a prestigious institution, it is tiny. In the mid-seventies it was home to no more than fifteen hundred students and was a tenth the size of colleges with comparable reputations such as Harvard or Yale. But despite its size, Caltech is the West Coast’s mecca for science and technology. Throughout its history it has attracted the leading people in their fields from all over the world. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan arrived there in the twenties and was frequently visited by Albert Einstein. Money simply pours into the place from benefactors ranging from private individuals fascinated with scientific research to multinationals such as IBM and Wang. With some of the best telescopes in the world a matter of miles away on Mount Wilson and the massive Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a gargantuan “annex” dwarfing the mother campus, it has everything a scientist could wish for.

Some of the world’s best physicists were based at Caltech in the seventies. Kip Thorne headed the relativity group there, and the charismatic Nobel laureate Richard Feynman still taught there and played bongos in college bands during the evenings. Academic quality aside, the contrast between Caltech and Caius could not have been starker. The buildings making up the campus, although tastefully designed and constructed in sand-colored stone, are all

Spanish-style, light and airy, with the nine-story Millikan Library block rising at the center. Those admitted to Caltech are among the very best students in the country, and they are driven hard. There is very little social life on campus, and the suicide rate among students ranks almost as high as its academic reputation. Having said that, there was no shortage of colorful characters around the place at the time of Hawking’s sabbatical.

Richard Feynman, a physics professor, had already acquired a formidable reputation as an amiable eccentric and once took on the local authorities who were trying to close down a topless bar in Pasadena. In court he claimed that he frequently used the place to work on his physics. Feynman and Hawking shared an offbeat sense of humor, and although their work rarely overlapped they had a lot of time for each other. Both men have achieved international fame as scientists and live-wire characters, and each has acquired cult status in the wider world outside his own discipleship of graduate students and fascinated laypeople. When Feynman died of cancer in 1988, the whole of Caltech mourned and the global village of science felt the loss.

Kip Thorne, now viewed as the West Coast’s relativity guru, favors floral shirts, beads, and shoulder-length gray hair. He introduced Hawking to another physicist who was to play a significant role in collaborations and become one of Hawking’s lifelong friends—Don Page. Page, who was born in Alaska and graduated from a small college in Missouri, was working on his Ph.D. at the time of Hawking’s visit. The two of them immediately hit it off, and before Hawking’s year at Caltech was over they had written a black hole paper together.

The family was excited by the move. Jane organized all the details, booking airline tickets, packing, and arranging schedules, as well as managing to transport a severely disabled husband and two young children to the other side of the world almost single-

handedly. At Caltech Hawking was treated with the respect he should have received at his own college in Cambridge. Wooden ramps were fitted against the curbs in the vicinity of his office so that he could get around easily in his wheelchair, and he was provided with a smart office and every aid and resource he would need to help him with his research. The work was satisfying, and he found collaboration with Thorne’s team both stimulating and scientifically rewarding. Jane and the children enjoyed the Southern California climate. Despite the air pollution, noise, and traffic congestion of Los Angeles, the beaches and the blue Pacific made a welcome change from the often monotonous lifestyle and erratic weather of Cambridgeshire.

With her blonde hair, four-year-old Lucy was the epitome of the California flower child and loved the place. Robert had to continue with his schooling, but there was plenty of time for the family to be together and do at least some of the things they enjoyed back home. Within Caltech’s cloistered environment, the family was sheltered from the extremes Los Angeles had to offer and, moving in privileged academic circles, Pasadena was not unlike the coziness of Cambridge—but with sunshine. Jane took the children to Disneyland, and Stephen joined them to travel around Southern California when he could take time off from his research. Friends and colleagues would often visit. They took trips in hired cars to Palm Springs and resorts along the coast, as well as getting to see a little more of America between duties at Pasadena.

Back in Britain, the government had finally agreed to join the European Common Market by the end of the decade and oil had begun to flow from the North Sea rigs. It seemed that the early-seventies gloom of strikes, power cuts, and the three-day week may at last have begun to lift. American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts shook hands hundreds of miles above a burning Cambodia.

Returning to England in 1975, the family was ready for changes and improvements in their own lives.

It often takes a protracted change of lifestyle to highlight the alterations that can be made when things return to the old routine, and the Hawkings saw immediately that they did not want to go back to the old pattern of life in Cambridge. In some ways they were glad to be back home. The countryside was greener, the weather less predictable, the television less obtrusive, and the tea tasted as God had ordained it to taste. But the simple fact was that, having experienced the comforts of California, they were no longer prepared to put up with some of the inconveniences of their lives in Cambridge.

The first thing that hit them was that, quaint and nostalgic as it may have been, the house in Little St. Mary’s Lane was far too small for them. Stephen was finding it impossible to use the stairs, and it was too cramped for a family of four. Hawking asked the college to help them find somewhere more suitable for their needs. On this occasion, the authorities were more than willing to come to their assistance. As Hawking puts it, “By this time, the College appreciated me rather more, and there was a different Bursar.”¹

They were offered a ground-floor flat in a large Victorian house owned by the college, on West Road, not far from the gate of King’s College and a mere ten minutes’ wheelchair ride from the DAMTP. The house has a large garden, regularly tended by college gardeners who kept it in a permanent state of elegance. The children loved it, and there was never a problem about their playing on the lawns, an informal truce with the gardeners having been established. Wide doorways made it easy for Hawking to maneuver his wheelchair around the entire flat, and because it was all on one level he no longer had to struggle upstairs to get to the bedroom.

By 1974 Hawking was having difficulty getting in and out of bed and feeding himself. Until their return from the States, Jane had

been Stephen’s unpaid, twenty-four-hours-a-day nurse, as well as his wife. She had, of course, been fully aware of the responsibilities expected of her when she decided to marry Stephen in 1965, but the effort of bringing up two young children and running the home as well as looking after her husband was beginning to take its toll on her emotional well-being. They decided to invite one of Hawking’s research students to live with them on West Road. The flat was big enough for another adult, and in return for free accommodation the student would help Jane look after Stephen.

The system worked well. In fact, as Hawking’s prestige grew it was considered an honor and a good career move to become his “student-in-residence.” It was inevitable that close bonds were established between the young research assistant and his mentor. While Jane received much-needed help, the student gained a closer insight into Hawking’s mind, and some of his genius was bound to rub off. At least that was the theory. There was, of course, another side to this: as Hawking himself has said, “It was hard for a student to be in awe of his professor after he has helped him to the bathroom!”² Bernard Carr, who was one of Hawking’s earliest students to have this honor and is now at the University of London, describes his time there as “like participating in history.”³ The duties of the lodgers were manifold. To earn their keep they were expected to play as required the roles of nanny, secretary, and handyman, helping with travel arrangements, babysitting the children, drawing up lecture schedules, and managing general household repairs.

Another early lodger was the American physicist Don Page. After finishing his Ph.D. at Caltech, Page had written to Hawking asking for a job reference. In the months that followed, several research groups wrote to Hawking about Page, and each time he gave a favorable reference. Then, some time later, he wrote to the young physicist, “I’ve been writing letters of reference for you, but I may have a position myself.”⁴ Hawking managed to help Page secure

funding for a year and then organized a grant for a further two years of research. Page joined the Hawking household in 1976 and reestablished the close friendship they had enjoyed in California, a friendship that has survived to the present day.

One of Page’s duties was to commute with Hawking each day between West Road and the DAMTP. This was seen as a good time to talk, to summarize the previous day’s efforts, and to consider the tasks for the day ahead. It was a very productive time, even though Page found Hawking’s way of working through complex mathematics in his head quite hard to get used to. Talking about the twice-daily journey, he has said:

I found it very good training. During the three years I was a postdoc, I lived with the Hawking family, and a lot of times I’d walk back and forth with him. Of course I couldn’t write while I was walking, and sometimes he would ask me something, and I’d try to think it out in my head. When you have to do it in your head, you have to get really to the heart of the matter and try to eliminate the inessential details.⁵

Around the time of the move to West Road, Hawking found that he could no longer use the three-wheel invalid car he had had on loan from the National Health Service since 1969 and in which he traveled to the Institute of Astronomy three times a week. At first this appeared to be another blow, but, as has often been the case with the Hawkings, they were able to turn the situation to their advantage. Jane says:

It was a blessing in disguise, because the roads are so dangerous out to the Institute anyhow. It didn’t matter because we could afford to buy the electric wheelchair . . . which he runs along in, and is really much more convenient for him because he doesn’t have to be sure of having people to help him in and out as he does with the car. So he’s completely independent in the electric wheelchair. There’s always some compensating factor that makes deterioration acceptable.⁶

Hawking became a real demon of a wheelchair driver. One journalist described his skills thus:

He hurtles out into the street. At full throttle the chair is capable of a decent trotting pace, and Hawking likes to use full throttle. He also knows no fear. He simply shoots out into the middle of the road on the assumption that any passing cars will stop. His assistants rush nervously out ahead of him to try to minimize the danger.⁷

Jane’s relief that he no longer had to use the three-wheeler on the roads of Cambridge could so easily have been misplaced. Indeed, in early 1991, Hawking was involved in an accident in his wheelchair. He is a very familiar figure in the city, and passersby stop and talk to him. However, on this occasion a driver failed to see the chair with the slumped figure of the world’s most famous living scientist at the controls. The car hit the chair, and Hawking’s frail body was thrown on to the road. It could have been a disastrous accident, but fortunately he suffered only minor injuries, cutting his face and damaging a shoulder. It is typical of the man that, against medical advice, he was back in his office within forty-eight hours and demanding that his papers and books be propped up in front of him so that he could work.

On other occasions, his “boy-racer” antics have caused great embarrassment. In June 1989, Hawking was to deliver the prestigious Halley Lecture at Oxford University. A young, newly appointed physics professor, George Efstathiou, was given the unenviable task of looking after the eminent visiting lecturer before, during, and after the talk. Hawking arrived at the Department of Zoology, where the university’s largest lecture theater is housed, and was escorted into reception. It was Efstathiou’s job to get his famous charge to the theater, one floor below, where the vice-

chancellor of the university and six hundred students, city dignitaries, and interested laypeople were waiting in expectation.

A two-man lift at the end of the reception area would take them to the floor below and lead, via a short corridor, to the lecture theater. The lift doors were open. Before Efstathiou had a chance of helping Hawking into the lift, Hawking set the chair to full throttle and headed for the open doors a dozen yards ahead of him.

Efstathiou remembers clearly that he estimated, even from that distance, that Hawking could not make it into the narrow lift entrance, and he could do nothing but watch in horror as his guest speaker hurtled toward the aperture. At last propelled into action, Efstathiou gave chase but could not catch up. To his amazement Hawking made it through the lift doors.

But that was only the beginning of Efstathiou’s troubles. For as Hawking had entered the lift, the chair had twisted at an angle and jammed in the narrow space. The lift doors closed automatically behind the chair, trapping its wheels between them. Efstathiou was panic stricken. Downstairs, hundreds of people were waiting for Hawking, who was already late. The disabled scientist could not reach any of the control buttons, but the doors had closed on him. What was to be done?

Meanwhile, seemingly unperturbed by events, Hawking was busily punching instructions into his computer to get it to put the chair into reverse. If Efstathiou could have seen his face, he would undoubtedly have encountered the famous, mischievous Hawking smile. Finally, Efstathiou succeeded in squeezing his arm into the crack between the doors and just managed to reach the door-opening button. Freed, Hawking sent the chair into high-speed reverse and reemerged unscathed and grinning. As Efstathiou says, “That experience was quite an initiation into college administration!”

Hawking uses his wheelchair as an appendage to his paralyzed body, a device for the physical expression of his personality. He can-

not shout and scream at people. Nowadays, of course, his computer-generated voice is totally expressionless, but he can certainly move his wheelchair around. Hawking has, as one journalist put it, “a strain of fierceness running through [his] personality, surfacing in spates of impatience or anger.”⁸ If he feels that someone is wasting his time, he simply spins his wheelchair on the spot and speeds out of the room in a huff.

John Boslough recalls an incident when he got on the wrong side of Hawking and received the usual rebuff. While talking to him he had become so oblivious to the other’s condition that he began talking about a problem he was having with his elbow as a result of a squash match in London the day before. “Hawking made no comment. He simply steered his wheelchair out of the room and waited in the hall for me to return to the subject at hand—theoretical physics.”⁹ Perhaps talking to a paralyzed man about squash was not the most subtle of things to do, but the incident illustrates the very well known fact that Hawking is certainly not a man to cross lightly.

His favorite move, when he is annoyed by something someone has said, is to drive over their toes. By all accounts, a number of his students and colleagues have had to develop pretty fast reflexes. One of Hawking’s former students, Nick Warner, claims, “His great regret is that he’s not yet run over Margaret Thatcher!”¹⁰ Perhaps he will get the chance one day.

There is, of course, a very different side to his personality: Hawking the family man. He loves nothing more than using his wheelchair skills when playing with his children and applies his usual recklessness when racing around the garden of West Road playing tag. The sad fact is that he can play no other physical games with them. It was Jane who taught them cricket and played Stephen’s old game of croquet on warm summer evenings with Robert, Lucy, and, later, Timothy. As one journalist wrote,

In many ways, she has had to be both mother and father to her children. Even the hours she spent as a schoolgirl on the cricket pitch of St. Albans High School, alternately bored to tears and terrified of the ball, were to have their value. “I have been the one who has to teach my two boys to play cricket—and I can get them out!” she has said.¹¹

As their first two children were growing up, Hawking was receiving greater and greater accolades as a scientist. In the space of just two years, 1975 and 1976, he won six major awards. First was the Eddington Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in London, given the year he returned from California. This was followed shortly by the Pius XI Medal, bestowed by the Pontifical Academy of Science at the Vatican. In 1976 came the Hopkins Prize, the Dannie Heinemann Prize from the USA, the Maxwell Prize, and the Royal Society’s Hughes Medal—the citation for which noted “his remarkable results in his work on black holes.” As the international physics community began to recognize his talents, his own university was increasingly acknowledging Hawking’s worth. During the move from Little St. Mary’s Lane to West Road, he was made reader in gravitational physics at the DAMTP, an academic position somewhere between a fellow and a professor.

As the awards and prizes mounted up, Jane was becoming increasingly disillusioned with their life and her role in it. It was a time of great change in the way the West perceived women and their position in society. The sixties, for all their sexual liberation and permissiveness, saw very little real change in the role played by women or the way in which they were treated by the other half of the population. What sexual permissiveness and “liberation” really meant was a different system by which the average woman could be exploited, the whole thing wrapped in a sugarcoating of freely available contraception and shifted morality.

In the seventies, women gained a little more self-respect. This was in part backed up by changes in the law and the support of the media. Some of these events undoubtedly altered Jane’s perception of her role. She was happy to play nurse, support her husband through his glittering career, and raise a family almost singlehandedly. But she had a growing feeling that she was being ignored as a human being, as an intelligent woman who was academically successful in her own right. She was beginning to feel like nothing more than a sidekick to the great Stephen Hawking. As she has put it:

Cambridge is a jolly difficult place to live if your only identity is as the mother of small children. The pressure is on you to make your own way academically.¹²

Cambridge looks like a quaint little English town, but there is a certain degree of bitchiness within its refined academic elite. Although the university community has always been quick to reinforce the image of Jane Hawking as a caring and devoted mother and wife, an element of professional jealousy does undoubtedly creep in. The claws are only sheathed by a thin veneer of civilization, and while her husband was collecting prize after prize, Jane was sliding into a state of declining self-respect:

I felt very hurt. I saw myself single-handedly making everything possible for Stephen and bringing up the two children at the same time. And the honors were all going to Stephen.¹³

She decided to do something about it and embarked on a Ph.D. course in medieval languages, specializing in Spanish and Portuguese poetry. She has said on reflection:

It was not a very happy experience. When I was working I thought I should be playing with the children, and when I was playing with the children I thought I should be working.¹⁴

Jane survived the course and went on to become a schoolteacher in Cambridge. But the feeling, as she puts it, of being “an appendage” has never left her entirely:

I’m not an appendage, though Stephen knows I very much feel I am when we go to some of these official gatherings. Sometimes I’m not even introduced to people. I come along behind and I don’t really know who I’m speaking to.¹⁵

To be fair to Stephen Hawking, according to his friends and colleagues he has never failed to bolster Jane’s contribution to his success and well-being. He takes every opportunity to speak of the great efforts and sacrifices she has made in order to allow them to live as normal a life as possible. One of his great regrets is that he has been unable to play a greater role in helping to raise the children, and he would love to be able to play more than tag and chess with them.

Naturally, Hawking’s condition has freed him from many duties other than helping to run the home. His various positions at the university have all come with reduced teaching and administration loads, and he has been allowed to spend a far greater proportion of his time thinking than ever the average professor can manage. Some have attributed his great successes in cosmology to this enhanced cerebral freedom, yet others have claimed that the turning point in the application of his abilities was the onset of his condition and that before then he was no more than an averagely bright student. Whatever the reason for his great insight and astonishing grasp of his subject, it may be true to say that he would not have progressed so quickly or soared to such heights if he had been expected to

spend vast amounts of time organizing committees, attending faculty meetings, and overseeing undergraduate applications.

Feelings of growing resentment over their respective roles within the partnership were not the only difficulties slowly growing into problems for the couple during the seventies. There was the question of religion. Jane was raised as a Christian and has very strong religious views. To one interviewer she has said:

Without my faith in God, I wouldn’t have been able to live in this situation. I wouldn’t have been able to marry Stephen in the first place, because I wouldn’t have had the optimism to carry me through, and I wouldn’t be able to carry on with it.¹⁶

Hawking, for his part, is not an atheist; he simply finds the idea of faith something he cannot absorb into his view of the Universe. His outlook is not unlike that of Einstein, and he has been quoted as saying:

We are such insignificant creatures on a minor planet of a very average star in the outer suburbs of one of a hundred thousand million galaxies. So it is difficult to believe in a God that would care about us or even notice our existence.¹⁷

It is clear from these two statements alone that the couple has had very different views almost from the moment they met. Jane attributes Hawking’s religious views partly to his physical condition:

As one grows older it’s easier to take a broader view. I think the whole picture for him is so different from the whole picture for anybody else by virtue of his condition and his circumstances—being an almost totally paralysed genius—that nobody else can understand what his view of God is or what his relationship with God might be.¹⁸

But is this really the case? There have been many philosophers and scientists throughout history who would have made very similar statements to Hawking’s, but they did not suffer from ALS. Equally, of course, there are a number of practicing scientists who have very strong Christian convictions, and some have claimed that Hawking is simply not qualified to make statements about religion because he knows nothing about it. But what qualifications does one need? Hawking works in a field that does impinge on religion. His work deals with the origins and early life of the Universe. Could a subject be any more religious? He once stated:

It is difficult to discuss the beginning of the Universe without mentioning the concept of God. My work on the origin of the Universe is on the borderline between science and religion, but I try to stay on the scientific side of the border. It is quite possible that God acts in ways that cannot be described by scientific laws. But in that case one would just have to go by personal belief.¹⁹

And that has never been Hawking’s way.

When asked if there is any conflict between religion and science, Hawking tends to fall back on the same argument about personal belief and sees no real conflict. “If one took that attitude,” he replied, when asked whether he believed that science and religion were competing philosophies, “then Newton would not have discovered the law of gravity.”²⁰ And what, in the light of Stephen’s and Jane’s dilemma, do we make of the famous last paragraph of A Brief History of Time?

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the Universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we would know the mind of God.²¹

Science, it seems, may one day answer the question “how?” but not “why?”

Despite such statements, what really began to cause problems for Jane was a growing feeling that her husband was trying to eradicate any necessity for God in his view of the Universe. And as his fame and influence grew, she saw this as an escalating problem. It is doubtful that she believed he was fighting any kind of antireligious crusade with his work or that he was deliberately trying to prove the faithful wrong. It simply seemed to her that, in his Universe, pure mathematical reasoning overrode any need for God:

There’s one aspect of his thought that I find increasingly upsetting and difficult to live with. It’s the feeling that, because everything is reduced to a rational, mathematical formula, that must be the truth. He is delving into realms that really do matter to thinking people and in a way that can have a very disturbing effect on people—and he’s not competent.²²

But who is? If nothing else, religion is a very personal matter. Are the leaders of the various churches any more knowledgeable about the origins and meaning of life than a scientist? Why should Stephen Hawking be any less competent to talk about God than the next person—or the next pontiff, come to that? Were the men of God right to sentence Galileo to end his years in solitary misery? Were they right to burn Giordano Bruno at the stake for daring to propose a contrary view of the Universe? Have all the religious wars of human history, with their accompanying terror and misery, been justifiable? Has organized religion been competent in those circumstances?

Jane is not scientifically trained and cannot share her husband’s insight into the subject, which he can articulate only with his professional colleagues. She has said:

One of my greatest regrets is that, not being a mathematician, I can understand Stephen’s work only in picture terms. He has to keep everything down to earth to explain it to me. It’s a good discipline for him.²³

This had never been a problem before, but when Jane began to see that Hawking was approaching territory whose philosophical foundations were very close to her personal beliefs, it must have set alarm bells ringing.

What she objects to most strongly is Hawking’s “no-boundary” model of the Universe, which suggests that the Universe is self-contained. It is a model with which Hawking is particularly pleased. He has said of the idea, “It really underlies science because it is really the statement that the laws of science hold everywhere.”²⁴ When addressing the problem of whether, if the Universe is self-contained, we need to explain how it got there in the first place, his answer is that we do not—“It would just BE.”²⁵

Hawking has at least one close colleague with strong religious convictions, his friend and collaborator Don Page. In fact Page is a born-again Christian, an evangelist as well as a cosmologist. He seems to find no difficulty in marrying the two extreme aspects of his life and work. He says of the no-boundary model:

[In] the Judaeo-Christian view, God creates and sustains the entire Universe rather than just the beginning. Whether or not the Universe has a beginning has no relevance to the question of its creation, just as whether an artist’s line has a beginning and an end, or instead forms a circle with no end, has no relevance to the question of its being drawn.²⁶

Jane once told a reporter that she had been saddened when, soon after he had taken up residence in their home, Page tried to engage Hawking in a religious discussion but was forced to give up. Despite their vastly differing outlooks, the two men have remained friends, simply agreeing not to discuss any form of personal God.

Hawking confounds both his critics and supporters with seemingly ambiguous statements, such as:

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?²⁷

Surely Hawking is not here suggesting that there may be a role for a Creator after all. On this matter he seems to take pleasure in leaving things open ended. By simply limiting the need for a God, he has held back from denying God’s existence altogether:

Einstein once asked the question, “How much choice did God have in constructing the Universe?” If the no-boundary proposal is correct, he had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions. He would, of course, still have had the freedom to choose the laws that the Universe obeyed. This, however, may not really have been all that much of a choice; there may well be only one, or a small number of complete unified theories . . . that are self-consistent and allow the existence of structures as complicated as human beings who can investigate the laws of the Universe and ask about the nature of God.²⁸

Thinkers on both sides of the divide—those who support conventional religious views as well as the cynics and atheists—have quoted and misquoted Hawking on so many occasions that one writer recently compared his eloquence and quotability to that of Shakespeare or the Bible. Hawking scoffs at such suggestions, restating the fact that his quotability is derived from his succinctness, a talent he has had to nurture because of the difficulty he has communicating.

Hawking seems to have done little to help Jane through this crisis. She was, and perhaps still is, left exasperated by his stubbornness on the issue. “I pronounce my view that there are different ways of approaching it [religion], and the mathematical way is only one way,” Jane has said, “and he just smiles.”²⁹

It is not only conventional religion for which Hawking feels extreme skepticism. The lessons he learnt from the ESP experiments in the fifties have never left him, and he has no time for mysticism or metaphysics in any shape or form. A number of writers have made attempts to bridge the gap between mysticism and late-twentieth-century physics. There are many who see parallels between Eastern religion and quantum mechanics, ancient teachings, and chaos theories, but Hawking pooh-poohs the whole scene. In his book Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, Dennis Overbye describes an occasion when he met Hawking in the seventies and managed to steer him onto the topic of mysticism without getting his toes crushed. Overbye quoted the anthropologist Joseph Campbell on the Hindu goddess Kali, “the terrible one of many names whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled, whose womb is giving birth forever to all things.” He then tried to draw a connection between Kali and black holes. Barely able to contain himself, Hawking snorted:

It’s fashionable rubbish. People go overboard on Eastern mysticism simply because it’s something different that they haven’t met before. But, as a natural description of reality, it fails abysmally to produce results. . . . If you look through Eastern mysticism you can find things that look suggestive of modern physics or cosmology. I don’t think they have any significance.

Calling these things black holes was a master-stroke by Wheeler because it does make a [psychological] connection, or conjure up a lot of human neuroses. If the Russian term “frozen star” had been generally adopted, then this part of Eastern mythology would not at all seem significant. They’re named black holes because they relate to human fears of being destroyed or gobbled up. So in that sense there is a connection. I don’t have fears of being thrown into them. I understand them. I feel in a sense that I’m their master.³⁰

However, a number of journalists and commentators on the periphery of Hawking’s world have made some quite ridiculous

extrapolations on this theme. To some, Hawking is a metaphor for his own work, a black hole astronaut himself. When Overbye put this to him, he was understandably ruffled by the suggestion.

“I’ve always found I could communicate,”³¹ he snapped back, and went for Overbye’s toes.

Black hole astronaut or not, the amount Hawking traveled during the seventies was increasing each year. In the winter of 1976 he undertook an American tour, taking in talks at important conferences in Chicago and Boston. Even to other scientists who knew him from symposia and conferences around the globe, his speech was all but unintelligible, and when members of the general public and journalists were in attendance they found it almost as difficult to grapple with Hawking’s speaking voice as with his subject matter.

Despite the fact that conference organizers were invariably forewarned of Hawking’s disabilities, more often than not there would be no easy access to the stage in the lecture theater. He would have to make it there without ramps or lifts. On such occasions Hawking’s friends and colleagues would come to his rescue, up to six of them manhandling his heavy wheelchair. Although Hawking himself weighed little more than ninety pounds, the chair ran on car batteries which added to the weight and, according to those who have taken part in these exercises, there was always the fear that they would drop him or that he would hurt his neck. One friend has described how he could see Hawking’s head bobbing around as six of the biggest scientists in his group lifted the wheelchair five feet up on to the stage, and how he was terrified that one day something would go disastrously wrong, simply because the organizers hadn’t thought things through.

Hawking made a great impression during his 1976 trip to the States. The stick-like figure hunched in his wheelchair was, to the vast majority of the audience, mumbling incomprehensibly, appear-

ing to make his pronouncements to a point on the stage six feet in front of him. But despite this, those who came to hear him speak always took him very seriously. Close colleagues who could understand what he was saying translated for their neighbors as best they could, with one ear concentrating on the mathematics Hawking was describing. Slides and the relief of numerous corny jokes helped, but it was always hard work.

By this time he had completely reversed his ideas about black holes and thermodynamics, the very ideas that had created such arguments a few years earlier. At a talk in Boston entitled “Black Holes Are White Hot,” he caused a stir with a conclusion refuting Einstein’s famous statement “God doesn’t play dice.” “God not only plays dice,” Hawking proclaimed, “he sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.”

Interviewers were queuing up to speak to Hawking. In January 1977 the BBC broadcast a program called The Key to the Universe, with an accompanying book, by Nigel Calder. The program was in large part devoted to Stephen Hawking’s latest work and profiled the man and his efforts to unify general relativity and quantum mechanics—“the key to the Universe” of the title. For the first time, the general public was exposed to the thirty-five-year-old Dr. Stephen Hawking and the facts of his disability as well as his work. It had the British public watching in their millions.

From 1977 publicity surrounding Hawking and his achievements began to escalate on a local, national, and global scale. Between reports of punks signing record contracts in front of Buckingham Palace and growing excitement over the Queen’s Jubilee that coming summer, there were mutterings in the Cambridge press about the odd fact that this famous scientist, a member of the Royal Society and black hole celebrity, appearing on television and with his face in the papers on an increasingly regular basis, did not hold a professorial position at Cambridge University.

There were muted suggestions that perhaps the university was disinclined to give the severely disabled scientist a professorship because he might not live too long. By March 1977, however, the university had decided to offer him a specially created chair of gravitational physics, which would be his for as long as he remained in Cambridge; the same year he was awarded the status of professorial fellow at Caius, a separate professorship bestowed by the college authorities.

The awards and honors continued to flood in. Robert Berman, Hawking’s undergraduate supervisor at Oxford, had recommended him as an honorary fellow of University College. In his letter to the General Purposes Committee, he said:

The current issue of Who’s Who shows some of his achievements, but cannot keep pace with the rate of award of honors.

I can’t imagine that the College has ever produced a more distinguished scientist, and it would bring us honor if our association with his career were made manifest (the outside world assumes he is entirely a Cambridge product).

It might seem surprising to ask to consider someone not yet 35 as an Honorary Fellow, but there are two reasons for this. First, his distinction is quite exceptional and we don’t have to wait for it to be generally recognized that he has made his mark. Hawking is mentioned in practically every article or lecture on black holes. His book (The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime) was what every cosmologist was waiting for.

Secondly, Hawking is gravely ill and is confined to a wheelchair with a type of creeping paralysis that normally cuts the lives of its victims very short. He is in an appalling physical state but his mind functions normally.

I hope that it won’t be felt that we must wait to see whether he actually gets a Nobel Prize!

Berman thought that he might have to argue his case further. He was subsequently staggered when the recommendation was accepted without a single objection at the committee’s first meeting.

The graffiti-daubing sluggard who, at Oxford University only sixteen years earlier, had spent more time drinking than working had come a very long way.