In 1978 Hawking was awarded one the most prestigious prizes in physics, the Albert Einstein Award given by the Lewis and Rose Strauss Memorial Fund, which announced the winner at a gala event in Washington. The citation claimed that Hawking’s work could lead to a unified field theory, “much sought after by scientists,”¹ as one Cambridge newspaper put it. The Albert Einstein Award is considered to be the prestigious equivalent of a Nobel Prize and was undoubtedly the most important award Hawking had received up until that time. Journalists began to talk about the possibility of the thirty-six-year-old physicist being next in line for the greatest academic honor of all—an invitation to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Stockholm.

However, there are two reasons why Hawking is unlikely ever to receive a Nobel Prize. First, a cursory glance at the list of winners since the first prizes in 1901 shows very few astronomers. The reason for this, according to one story, is that the chemist Alfred Nobel, who created the awards, decreed that astronomers should be ineligible. Rumor has it that their exclusion was because his wife

had an affair with an astronomer, and he subsequently felt only hatred for the whole profession. Despite this, Martin Ryle and Antony Hewish shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in radio astrophysics and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won it in 1983 for his theoretical studies on the origin and evolution of stars. These were awarded a good seventy years after the founder’s death, so perhaps the academy now views astronomers with greater sympathy.

There is, however, a more important reason for Hawking’s absence from the list of winners. One of the academy’s rules states that a candidate may be considered for a prize only if her discovery can be supported by verifiable experimental or observational evidence. Hawking’s work is, of course, unproved. Although the mathematics of his theories is considered beautiful and elegant, science is still unable even to prove the existence of black holes, let alone verify Hawking Radiation or any of his other theoretical proposals.

A year after receiving the Albert Einstein Award, Hawking’s second book was published by Cambridge University Press: a collection of sixteen articles to commemorate the centenary of Albert Einstein’s birth on March 14, 1879. Hawking coedited the book, entitled General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with his colleague Werner Israel. When Simon Mitton presented it to a sales conference in January 1979, the sales team, whose job it was to take books out on the road and convince retailers of their merit, was unusually enthusiastic. One of the sales staff said to Mitton, “That man Hawking—he’s amazing, you know. We’ll have no trouble selling this. All the quality bookshops will take it, no problem.” He was right. It was snapped up and sold exceptionally well in hardback and even better when later issued as a paperback. Hawking’s fame was spreading.

This was also the year that Stephen Hawking finally got his own office at the DAMTP—it came with his appointment as Lucasian

professor. Hawking is well aware of his place in the history of science. He is fascinated by the fact that he was born on the three-hundredth anniversary of Galileo’s death on January 8, 1642. That year Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, a little village in Lincolnshire, and it was Isaac Newton who was appointed Lucasian professor at Cambridge in 1669, three hundred and ten years before Hawking.

Albert Einstein considered Galileo the greatest of all scientists, and Hawking has claimed that he was, in his approach, the first twentieth-century scientist:

He was the first scientist to actually start using his eyes, both figuratively and physically. And, in a sense, he was responsible for the age of science we now enjoy.²

Galileo’s work led directly to Newton’s work and the establishment of classical physics. The work of Einstein, who was born one hundred years before Hawking received the Lucasian chair, turned “large-scale” physics on its head. Subsequently, many have seen Hawking as the physicist most likely to succeed in the enormous task of unifying the two supporting pillars of physics, quantum mechanics and relativity. Small wonder Hawking has a strong sense of science history.

At his inauguration as Lucasian Professor, Hawking delivered a memorable lecture entitled “Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?,” in which he suggested that a Grand Unified Theory describing the fundamental laws of the Universe could be achieved by the end of the century.

It was a stirring and inspiring idea. The audience knew as they streamed out of the hall that, if anyone could make that dream come true, it would be the waif-like figure who had earlier sat on the stage before them, crumpled in his motorized wheelchair, delivering powerful statements with his typical confidence.

The appointment as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University was one of the highlights of Hawking’s career. To be professor at one of the oldest and most respected universities in the world is a huge achievement in itself, but to have accomplished such a feat by the age of thirty-seven is remarkable. Newton was Hawking’s junior by ten years when he gained the chair, but in the seventeenth century there were far fewer academics and very little competition for such positions. Newton did also happen to be the youngest ever to be appointed Lucasian Professor at Cambridge.

Easter 1979 saw the birth of Stephen and Jane’s third child, a boy they christened Timothy. It was a happy time for the Hawking family. Against all odds, they had overcome tremendous hurdles to achieve great success. Jane had completed her Ph.D. and was finding a degree of intellectual satisfaction in her teaching job; Professor Hawking was receiving the esteem of his colleagues and growing popular acclaim as the “new Einstein.” Now there was another Hawking at West Road.

In the larger world outside the cloistered environs of Cambridge academia, the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of life was shaken yet again. Shortly before Timothy Hawking’s birth, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena were surprised to discover, via the deep space probe Voyager 1, that Jupiter had rings like its celestial neighbor, Saturn. Before the year was out, Margaret Thatcher had begun her eleven-year run as Britain’s first woman prime minister; the Queen’s cousin, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, was murdered by the IRA; and American embassy staff and marines were taken hostage in Tehran. Also that year, the Queen’s art adviser, Cambridge man Anthony Blunt, was exposed as the “fourth man.” Russia invaded Afghanistan, Mother Teresa of Calcutta was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and John Cleese continued to delight TV audiences by “not mentioning the war.” One of the year’s biggest films was Apocalypse Now.

At the turn of the decade, Hawking could look back satisfied with his achievements over the past ten years. The symptoms of ALS had leveled off. His speech was practically unintelligible to all but his close colleagues and family, and he was confined to his motorized wheelchair, but he continued to work and to travel as intensively as he had ever done. His freedom from mundane chores and responsibilities was paying dividends scientifically.

From 1980 the system of taking in graduate students to help around the house was replaced by community and private nursing. Jane had help looking after Stephen for a couple of hours in the morning and evening. They could just afford to flesh out the meager assistance provided by the National Health Service by dipping into monies Hawking had received from the growing number of awards and prizes coming his way and the increased salary from his new appointment.

Stephen and Jane began to cultivate a reputation as socialites and popular hosts on the Cambridge academic scene. Don Page has described Jane as “a great professional asset to her husband as a hostess.”³ Dr. Berman, Hawking’s tutor at Oxford, has said of her, “[Jane is] a remarkable woman. She sees that he does everything that a healthy person would do. They go everywhere and do everything.”⁴ The Hawkings were soon at the center of the social in-crowd at Cambridge. Being Lucasian Professor gave Stephen a huge measure of prestige, both in academic circles and in the broader view of the international intelligentsia. Dinner parties and social gatherings on West Road and at the DAMTP were frequent events, and guests often included visiting academics as well as members of the university hierarchy. Their interest in classical music was well catered for in Cambridge, and the couple was often to be seen at concerts in the city. They enjoyed going to the theater and the cinema and dining out, both at home in Cambridge and on visits abroad.

Stephen’s obvious handicaps would sometimes cause embarrassment to those who did not know him in restaurants and at various functions to which the couple were frequently invited. Casual onlookers, unaware of the fact that they were in the presence of one of the world’s greatest scientists, could be forgiven for thinking that the withered figure slumped in his wheelchair—trying to speak but succeeding only in producing an incomprehensible noise, having to be fed, his head, insufficiently supported by atrophied neck muscles, rolling forward, chin on chest—was a hopelessly crippled and pathetically disabled man, perhaps mentally as well as physically handicapped. Nothing could be further from the truth. On the subject of his disability, Hawking told an interviewer at the time:

I think I’m happier now than I was before I started. Before the illness set in I was very bored with life. I drank a fair amount, I guess, didn’t do any work. It was really a rather pointless existence. When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really appreciates everything that one does have.⁵

On another occasion he said, “If you are disabled physically, you cannot afford to be disabled psychologically.”⁶ Jane echoed this view, with a typically forthright and optimistic approach to life. “We try to make the most of every moment,”⁷ she told one interviewer.

A Sunday Times journalist once asked him whether he ever got depressed because of his disability. “Not normally,” he replied. “I have managed to do what I wanted to do despite it, and that gives me a feeling of achievement.”⁸

Another asked what was his biggest regret about contracting his illness. “Not being able to play physically with my children,” he said.⁹

Some years earlier, Hawking had entered into a protracted fight with the university authorities over improved access for him in the

DAMTP building. The row was about who was to pay for a ramp to be installed. Hawking eventually won and also managed to persuade the authorities to lower the curbs in the vicinity of Silver Street to ease his journey from West Road. Such clashes put Hawking in a fighting mood about the needs of the disabled, and he has been crusading for various causes ever since.

He took on Cambridge City Council over access to public buildings and won. After a long drawn-out argument and an exchange of increasingly abrasive letters, curbs were lowered in a number of vital places and ramps installed in various buildings. One particular dispute concerned a public building named Cockcroft Hall, used as a polling station during local elections. After polling day, Hawking complained to the council that it was practically impossible for the severely disabled to enter the building in order to vote. The council authorities tried to argue that Cockcroft Hall was not actually a public building and did not therefore come under the Disabled Persons Act of 1970. Because of Professor Hawking’s involvement, the local press became interested in the issue and subsequently ran a series of articles highlighting the problems faced by the disabled in Cambridge. The city council backed down.

Toward the end of 1979, the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation nominated Hawking for “Man of the Year,” and his efforts in fighting for the rights of handicapped people were again noted by the local press, which held him up as a champion of their cause. Hawking himself has ambivalent feelings on this issue. On the one hand, he wants to do what he can for other handicapped people, for, being disabled himself, he knows and fully understands the problems faced by the handicapped. He has a stubborn streak and definite strains of a rebellious nature, partly cultivated by his circumstances, which give him an appetite for dispute. He loves nothing more than a good argument, whether it is about cosmology, socialism, or the rights of the disabled. On the other hand, Hawking

has always made a conscious effort to detach himself from his condition. He has absolutely no interest in learning more about his illness or overemphasizing his disability.

One interviewer asked him if he regretted not using his intellectual powers to help find a cure for his illness. He replied that he would have found that too upsetting. He is a physicist, not a medical man, and knowing the gruesome details would, he feels, be totally unproductive. Hawking is, of course, very happy that others are working on a cure for ALS, but he does not wish to know how the research is going. He just wants to be told when they have made a breakthrough.

All this led to what was perceived at the time to be a strangely ambivalent attitude to the problems faced by the disabled. Critics began to complain that he was not doing enough, that his growing celebrity was a perfect platform for him to be heard above the crowd. As time has gone on, Hawking has indeed become more active, but the simple fact is that he hardly needs do anything because, just by staying alive and continuing to work at the intense rate he and the world have grown used to, he is an inspiration to handicapped people everywhere.

In a recent speech at an occupational science conference at the University of Southern California, he certainly made every effort to raise his voice above the crowd:

It is very important that disabled children should be helped to blend with others of the same age. It determines their self-image. How can one feel a member of the human race if one is set apart from an early age? It is a form of apartheid. Aids like wheelchairs and computers can play an important role in overcoming physical deficiencies; the right attitude is even more important. It is no use complaining about the public’s attitude about the disabled. It is up to disabled people to change people’s awareness in the same way that blacks and women have changed public perceptions.¹⁰

Having got a taste for it, Hawking did not restrict his campaigning to the problems of the disabled. He was beginning to show a growing interest in saying his piece about a number of wide-ranging socio-political issues. He led a campaign to change the ruling prohibiting the admission of women students into Caius College, a row that lasted the best part of a decade. He and Jane continued to be paid-up members of the Labour Party, and he was becoming increasingly vocal on social issues such as the plight of the poor and the state of the environment. He has joked that he is a “right-wing socialist,” but his attitudes toward concerns ranging from the Falklands War to nuclear disarmament show definite leanings toward a brand of liberalism prevalent in the Hawking household of his early years.

When accepting an award sponsored by a U.S. defense contractor, he lectured the executives of the company gathered at the ceremony on the senselessness of nuclear weapons:

We have the equivalent of four tons of high explosives for every person on earth. It takes half a pound of explosive to kill one person, so we have 16,000 times as much as we need. We must understand that we are not in conflict with the Soviets, that both sides have a strong interest in the stability of the other side. We ought to recognize that fact and cooperate, rather than arm ourselves against each other.¹¹

Apart from getting his own office, life at the DAMTP had changed little upon his appointment as Lucasian Professor. Silver Street is a narrow winding lane off King’s Parade in the center of Cambridge. The sign for the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics is unobtrusive to the point of near uselessness—visitors frequently find themselves unable to find the entrance unassisted. When finally discovered, the sign indicates an archway leading on to a cobbled courtyard. A number of cars are parked around the perimeter and there are stacks of bicycles, three deep, propped up against the

stonework. At the far end of the courtyard is a red door with a glass window and, on a wall to one side, is a brass plate announcing the department in a clearer and more elegant fashion.

Inside, a linoleum-floored hallway leads to a large, scruffy common room. Tables and low, soft chairs are randomly distributed around the room, left where positioned by their most recent occupants. The walls are painted gray, and the whole atmosphere is one of academic drabness, slightly neglected, workaday. From the common room, doors lead off to a number of offices. The one Hawking shared with a former student, Gary Gibbons, sports a sticker that says “Black Holes Are Out of Sight.” The door to his new office has a typically self-mocking addition pasted at head height: “QUIET PLEASE, THE BOSS IS ASLEEP.”

Hawking’s office has changed little since he took it over in 1979. It is relatively small and dominated by a desk set two-thirds of the way back from the door. The walls are lined with bookshelves and to one side of the desk sits a set of gadgets. The first is a telephone specially adapted with a microphone and loudspeaker so that he can use it without having to hold the handset. Next to that is another device—a page turner that automatically leafs through any book placed on a raised platform, operated at the touch of a button. Once an assistant has positioned a book for him and set the fasteners, Hawking can find any place in the text he wishes to read. Complications arise if he wants to consult a paper or read a magazine because the machine cannot handle them. On these occasions, the article has to be xeroxed and laid out on the desk for him. On the desk, next to framed pictures of the family, is a computer, augmented by the addition of two levers that operate a cursor on the screen. This replaces the normal keyboard and doubles as a “blackboard” and word processor.

There is a relaxed atmosphere in the department. Perpetuating the tradition of several decades, everyone meets twice daily for

morning coffee and afternoon tea. At these gatherings the talk centers on the day’s work. Spending five minutes in the DAMTP’s common room reveals an obvious fact: physicists love to talk shop. The students treat Hawking with playful irreverence; there is no standing on ceremony or elitism here. When the writer Dennis Overbye visited Hawking at the DAMTP he came across a group of students huddled around a Formica-topped table in the common room. “In age, dress, pallor and evidence of nutritional deficiency, they resembled the road-crew of a rock-and-roll band”¹² is how he described them. Hawking mucks in with them, cracking corny undergraduate jokes. Following an old tradition, if they hit on a bright idea during the course of their discussions they write out mathematical descriptions on the tabletops. “When we want to save something we just xerox the table,”¹³ Hawking told Overbye.

Hawking’s administrative duties extended to running the small relativity group, which consisted of a dozen or so research assistants of wide-ranging nationality and the supervision of a handful of Ph.D. students. Apart from these responsibilities, the professorship allowed him to carry on with what he had previously devoted so much time to—thinking.

At home Hawking’s schedule was a hectic one. Hardly a week would go by without a visit from a foreign colleague. It was now his responsibility to organize symposia and lectures given by physicists interested in visiting Cambridge. Hawking’s relativity group at the DAMTP was seen as being at the cutting edge of research, and there was no shortage of scientists interested in sharing their latest work with the Cambridge team.

Hawking had, by this time, established an exhausting work routine at the DAMTP, one that has changed little to this day. He rose early, but it could take up to two hours for him to get ready to leave the house, arriving at his office by 10 a.m. The journey from West

Road took no more than ten minutes and was usually spent in conversation with one of his Ph.D. students or research assistants. After checking the mail with his secretary, he usually spent the morning working at his computer or reading articles or papers written by others in the field. At 11 a.m. sharp he would wheel himself off to the common room where an assistant helped him with drinking his coffee, lifting the cup to Hawking’s mouth. He then often spent some time conversing, as best he could, with the students and research assistants, before returning to his office until lunchtime to make and receive telephone calls and answer correspondence.

At 1 p.m. precisely he would set off for lunch at Caius College. Usually accompanied by an assistant, he would set the control toggle of the wheelchair to full throttle and head off toward King’s Parade, passing by King’s College Chapel and the Senate House, his assistant having to break into a trot to keep up. Hawking loves this city in which he has spent most of his life. The grandeur of its architecture and the atmosphere of intense intellectual activity pervading the place are very important to him. Accompanied on this journey by one writer, he gave the interviewer a history lesson, tinged with his characteristic brand of irony:

When Dr. Caius reopened Gonville College in the sixteenth century, he built three gates. You entered through the Gate of Humility, you passed through the Gate of Wisdom and Virtue, and you left through the Gate of Honour. The Gate of Humility has been torn down. It’s not needed any more.¹⁴

After lunch each weekday, Hawking headed off back to the DAMTP to work until teatime. At 4 p.m. the usually silent common room would erupt with the noise of those who work there. Tea was drunk as a number of animated conversations took place in small groups. Then, as now, Hawking usually sat in one corner of the room. He rarely says more than a few sentences during the course

of tea, but when he does speak, people listen. One student has remarked that more can be gained from a few of Hawking’s crisp, precise statements than from a whole lecture by anyone else.

His students usually came to see him in the late afternoon. They would sit beside him at his desk or perch alongside the desktop computer screen. With the sheets of equations they had been working on spread before them, Hawking would survey their efforts and make a few clipped suggestions. His close associates, his research assistants, then fleshed out his comments and helped the Ph.D. students unravel problems and expand on the professor’s suggestions.

After tea Hawking usually worked until 7 p.m. He would then wheel his chair out of the building and rerun the morning’s journey in reverse. Some evenings he chose to dine with the other dons and professors at high table in college. On such occasions he would be obliged to dress in his professorial gown. At other times he stayed at home with Jane and the children, or the couple would go out to eat at a Cambridge restaurant while one of Hawking’s helpers babysat.

As his celebrity grew, the amount of time Hawking spent traveling abroad increased further. During the early 1980s he made several trips to America each year and attended numerous conferences and lectures in Europe and other parts of the globe. Roger Penrose has recalled that nothing would stop Stephen making trips to far-flung destinations and that he would try to attend every important conference, no matter where it was held. At one conference held in Belgium, he almost missed the plane home from Brussels because the cab driver taking him and Penrose to the airport got lost. Arriving at the airport, with the plane on the tarmac ready to leave, Penrose had to race along ramps and through airport buildings with Hawking’s wheelchair whirring along at full throttle beside him. They just made it in time, boarding the aircraft minutes before takeoff.

Jane began to travel abroad less frequently so that she could look after the growing family in Cambridge. The responsibility of nursing Hawking on foreign visits increasingly fell to his research assistants and close colleagues. Friends like Penrose would help out as best they could and travel with him when they were attending the same conference, but by this time one of his students would always have to go with him everywhere he went. Whenever possible Hawking tried to stretch the budget in order to finance a nurse to accompany him and his academic assistant. In this respect things were easier after he became Lucasian Professor, but even so academic institutions do not like to splash money around. By this time, however, Hawking had become sufficiently important, and his case exceptional enough, for rules to be bent somewhat.

If they did not travel with him to destinations all over the world, the family was certainly never forgotten. Penrose remembers one incident when their return flight was delayed and they had to spend several hours in an airport lounge. Hawking had spotted a cuddly toy in the display window of one of the shops. He told his friend that he wanted that particular toy to take home for Lucy. Commandeering Penrose to buy it for him, Hawking spent the rest of their wait with a large, pink fluffy animal perched on his lap, practically swamping his wasted body. Lucy was of course delighted with the gift.

When Hawking attended the groundbreaking cosmology conference organized by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in the Vatican in 1981 (see Chapter 11), Jane went with him. The conference delegates and their partners spent a week in Rome. On a number of evenings Stephen and Jane went out to restaurants, often sharing their table with Dennis Sciama and his wife Lydia, as well as other friends who were also attending the conference. Jane remembers the trip as a happy time for the two of them. Between meetings and discussions, Stephen tried to make time for sightseeing, one of his favorite pastimes.

In his address to the conference, the Pope warned the physicists against delving too deeply into the question of how or why the Universe began, reminding them that this was solely a matter for theologians. He went on:

Any scientific hypothesis on the origin of the world, such as that of the primeval atom from which the whole of the physical world derived, leaves open the problem concerning the beginning of the Universe. Science cannot by itself resolve such a question; what is needed is that human knowledge that rises above physics and astrophysics which is called metaphysics; it needs above all the knowledge that comes from the revelation of God.¹⁵

Hawking sat impassively in his wheelchair listening as Pope John Paul II told them that he saw nothing wrong with modern cosmology and even believed that there may be some substance to the idea of the Big Bang. But that, he said, was where the line of demarcation should be drawn, and cosmologists should not try to look beyond it. Some of the older scientists in attendance were reminded of another conference held at the Vatican in 1962, when the then Pope, John XXIII, declared that he hoped they would all follow the example of Galileo! It was at the 1981 Vatican Conference that Hawking announced his controversial “no-boundary” theorem and the religious connotations accompanying it. It was received enthusiastically by the audience, but what the Pope thought of the idea has not been reported. If nothing else, Hawking certainly has a highly developed sense of occasion.

After the conference, the visiting physicists and their spouses were invited to an audience with the Pope at his summer residence, Castel Gandolfo. The building itself is unimposing but possesses a simple beauty. Visitors pass through the little village surrounding the grounds and up to the house via a long driveway. The scientists from the Vatican were not the only guests of the Pope that afternoon, and security at Castel Gandolfo (and indeed in Vatican City)

was as tight as could be expected. That year, 1981, will surely be remembered as the year of assassination attempts.

Six months earlier, ex-Beatle John Lennon had arrived at his apartment in the Dakota Building in New York with his wife, Yoko Ono. Moments later he was senselessly gunned down by a psychopath, Mark Chapman, and millions of fans the world over were shaken at what they saw as the end of an era. In March 1981 the recently inaugurated President Reagan had been hit in the chest by a .22 bullet, and less than two months later Pope John Paul II himself had nearly died when he was struck by four bullets from a 9 mm Browning, one of which lodged in his lower intestine. The audience at Castel Gandolfo was the Pope’s first public appearance since the incident in St. Peter’s Square that had almost taken his life.

Following a private meeting with the physicists the Pope gave a speech in the main reception room, after which his guests were introduced to him in person as he sat on a raised chair upon a dais guarded by Papal security. The visitors entered from one side of the platform, knelt before the Pontiff, exchanged a few muttered words, and then left on the far side of the stage. When it was Hawking’s turn, he wheeled on to the stage and up to the Pope. The other guests watched as the man who, only days earlier, had talked of the “no-boundary” concept and the fact that there could be no need for a Creator came face to face with the leader of the Catholic Church and, for millions, God’s representative on Earth. Everyone, believer and cynic alike, was curious to know what would be said. However, no one in the room could have been more surprised by what happened next. As Hawking’s wheelchair came to a halt in front of the Pope, John Paul left his seat and knelt down to bring his face to Hawking’s level.

The two men talked for longer than any of the other guests. Finally the Pope stood up, dusted down his cassock and gave Hawking a parting smile, and the wheelchair whirred off to the far

side of the stage. There were a number of offended Catholics in the hall that afternoon, misinterpreting the Pope’s gesture as undue respect. Many of the nonscientists present were unfamiliar with Hawking’s latest proposals, but his reputation as a scientist with irreligious views was well known. They simply could not understand why the Pope should kneel before him; to them Hawking’s opinions were at the opposite end of the spectrum from orthodox Catholic doctrine. Why had John Paul not taken more interest in them, the faithful?

Back at the DAMTP, work continued as usual. Hawking’s third book for Cambridge University Press was published soon after his return. However, this time things did not run so smoothly, and there was a whole series of arguments between Hawking and Simon Mitton before the book saw the light of day. It was to be called Superspace and Supergravity, aimed at about the same level as The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, and was expected to sell in similar numbers to its predecessor—between five thousand and ten thousand copies over a period of years. The source of the dispute between Hawking and the publishers was the choice of cover for the book.

Hawking wanted a drawing from the blackboard in his office to be photographed and used on the dust jacket of the hardback edition, as well as on the cover when the book was issued in paperback. The trouble began when Simon Mitton realized that the picture, a bizarre cartoon covered with in-jokes and witticisms done by a group of colleagues after a recent conference at the DAMTP, had been drawn in color and required full-color printing. Hawking would not consider a black-and-white photograph of the illustration and was absolutely adamant about using a full-color representation.

Cambridge University Press insisted that they had never done a four-color cover for a book such as Hawking’s, which, even accepting his international fame as a scientist, would not sell enough

copies to warrant the expense. The cover, they stated, would make absolutely no difference to the number of copies the book sold. At this point Hawking saw red and declared that unless they agreed to use his cover he would withdraw the book completely. After a hastily convened editorial meeting, Mitton capitulated, but he was right—Superspace and Supergravity sold marginally less than The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime.

While the dispute with Cambridge University Press was in full flow and Hawking miraculously found time to work, travel, see his family, and engage in bureaucratic wrangles with the city authorities and university, the world at large was going through its usual turmoil. Riots hit British cities; there was intensified fighting in Beirut; and President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was brutally assassinated on October 6 during a military parade in Cairo. In December, doctors in the USA were alerted to a deadly new illness that appeared to attack the body’s immune system. But the news in 1981 was not all bad. In July an estimated 700 million TV viewers tuned in to see Prince Charles marry Lady Diana Spencer in St. Paul’s Cathedral; England claimed a remarkable cricketing victory against Australia; and the New Year Honours List announced at the end of December included a wheelchair-bound Cambridge physicist who had pioneered important work on black holes—Stephen Hawking was made a commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.

As the 1980s progressed, awards and honors continued to be bestowed on Hawking. In 1982 alone he was made honorary doctor of science by no fewer than four universities: the University of Leicester in Britain, and New York, Princeton, and Notre Dame universities in the USA.

The interest of the media intensified as Hawking’s recognition grew. In 1983 a BBC Horizon program profiled him at work at the DAMTP. For the first time the British public was given a chance to see Professor Hawking whirring around Cambridge in this wheel-

chair, talking in his strangely contorted way with his students and co-workers, at home on West Road with Jane and the children, and attending official functions. The public was captivated. One magazine article after another appeared in rapid succession. The London Times and Telegraph newspapers ran pieces about him, and indepth interviews turned up in the New York Times, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair. A few short years into the decade and “black hole” and “Stephen Hawking” had become synonymous in the eyes of the media and the general public.

Hawking has never been a man to shy away from publicity and he thoroughly enjoyed his growing fame. However, fame alone does not pay the bills, and in the early eighties there were intensifying financial pressures on the Hawking household. A professor’s salary is not large compared with equivalent positions in industry or commerce, and occasional monies from prizes and awards were erratic and usually too small to make any real difference. With the strain of running a home and maintaining her own career, Jane was finding that the little nursing help they could afford was growing increasingly inadequate. She desperately needed more private nursing assistance, and that would be expensive.

That was not all. They had managed to finance their eldest son Robert’s education at the fee-paying Perse School in Cambridge since the age of seven. He had been highly successful academically and was scheduled in a few short years to go to university. Grants were available, but they would not cover all the expenses of a three-year degree course. Coinciding with these problems was the fact that, in 1982, Lucy was in her final year at a junior state school, Newnham Croft. Stephen and Jane both wanted her to attend the Perse School, as her brother had done. With Timothy growing and everyday family expenditures increasing, there seemed to be no way for them to afford school fees for two children.

And what of the future? Stephen’s illness had been stable for a number of years, but things could begin to slide again at any time— that was the nature of the disease. If he could no longer work, the prizes would soon dry up and his pension from the university could not sustain them comfortably. There was another great fear: if Jane could no longer look after Stephen and earn a salary, what would become of him? They did not like to discuss the awful possibilities, but they were there and had to be faced. They needed money, quickly. The last thing any of them wanted was for Stephen to end up in a nursing home, if his condition should degenerate further, simply because they could not afford to look after him at home.

Something had to be done and fast. Hawking had the germ of an idea in the back of his mind. He had mentioned it to no one but had allowed it to grow and develop. Now, he realized, he would have to put his idea into action. It would be a number of years before Hawking’s secret plan would come to fruition and, with one stroke, solve the family’s financial problems. When it did, it was to change everything. But first there were intriguing developments to follow up in the field of inflationary cosmology.