The mid-sixties turned out to be one of the most important times in Stephen Hawking’s life. Having become engaged to Jane, he realized that he would need to find a job very quickly if they were to be married. After obtaining a doctorate, the next stage in the career of any academic is usually to secure a fellowship, accompanied by a grant, in order to continue research. Much like the transition from undergraduate studies to postgraduate research, applications for fellowships are usually made while working on a Ph.D., rather than leaving things until afterward. So while in the throes of writing his thesis, and with a wedding planned for the coming summer, Hawking had to look around for available posts. Fortunately he did not have to look far. He heard about a theoretical physics fellowship being offered by another college at the university, Caius,* to begin that autumn. Without hesitating he began to organize his application. However, getting such a relatively simple thing off the ground did not turn out to be as easy as he had hoped.

At this stage of his illness he was unable to write and had planned to ask Jane to type his application during her next visit to Cambridge the coming weekend. But when his fiancée stepped off the train, she greeted him with her arm in plaster up to the elbow. She had had an accident the previous week and broken her arm. Hawking admits that he was not as sympathetic toward her as perhaps he should have been when he saw the state she was in, but hurt feelings were quickly mended and together they tried to work out how they could get the application written. Jane’s left arm had been broken and she is right-handed, so Hawking dictated the information and she was able to write the application by hand. They managed to get a friend in Cambridge to type it up for them.

However, that was not the end of Hawking’s problems. As a requirement of the application he had to give two references. Obviously Dennis Sciama was his first referee; he was, naturally, very supportive, and suggested Hermann Bondi as the second. Hawking had met Bondi on several occasions at the King’s College seminars given by Roger Penrose earlier that year, and Bondi had communicated to him a paper he had written to the Royal Society a few months earlier. Encouraged by this, Hawking decided, with near-catastrophic consequences, to ask Bondi to give him a reference. As Hawking puts it:

I asked him after a lecture he gave in Cambridge. He looked at me in a vague way, and said, yes he would. Obviously, he didn’t remember me, for when the College wrote to him for a reference, he replied that he had not heard of me.¹

If such a serious blow had happened today he would almost certainly not have had a hope of getting his fellowship. In the sixties, however, competition for academic posts was not quite as fierce as it is now, and the authorities at Caius showed great tolerance in writing to tell him of the embarrassing situation. Sciama came to

the rescue again and contacted Bondi to refresh his memory about the promising young researcher. Bondi then gave Hawking a glowing reference, possibly far kinder than one he might originally have written.

The college council at Caius meets annually during the Lent term to elect new fellows. There are usually six or seven positions on offer, covering the full spectrum of subjects, and if elected the successful applicant joins the seventy-odd fellows already in residence at the college. The council consists of around a dozen senior fellows, headed by the college master. In 1965 the master was the famous historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham. Hawking came with good recommendations, and a number of the science fellows on the council, including Needham, had heard of him via the early reputation he had already gained in Cambridge academic circles. As Shakespeare says, “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” and maybe this has never been truer than in Hawking’s case. Despite the confusion over references, the council favored him over his competitors, and he received his fellowship at Caius. As far as Hawking’s career was concerned, he and Jane could now look to the future with a degree of confidence.

The duties of fellows are minimal beyond the basic condition that they continue with their research. They are required to do a little student supervision, but the level to which this is taken varies enormously. The role of the fellow, like many other things at Cambridge University, has changed little since Sir Isaac Newton’s time. Fellowship is considered a great honor and a means by which academics may continue with their research and be paid for it. In return, a college gains prestige if one of its fellows turns out to be highly successful.

Possessing more than his fair share of cheek, Hawking nearly blew it again after having secured his fellowship at Caius. He managed this feat by almost pushing things too far with the Bursar. On

a whim, he decided to ask him what he would be paid for his new position and was rebuked for his impertinence. Although he could not foresee it at the time, soon after they were married this faux pas would cause him and Jane still further problems.

The couple was married in July 1965 in the chapel of Hawking’s postgraduate college, Trinity Hall. It was not a typical “academic” wedding, but neither was it, by any means, a society occasion. Both sets of parents were ordinary, middle-class people. Jane’s father, George Wilde, was a civil servant, and the Wilde family had known the Hawkings for some time before their children had met, so the wedding arrangements were perhaps a little less fraught with arguments than they might have been. Around a hundred guests attended, and the service was followed by a reception with all the usual speeches and champagne toasts to the happy couple. Brandon Carter remembers the wedding as the first occasion on which he met the Hawking family. He recalls Frank Hawking as a tall, slim man with a quiet and dignified air about him. Hawking’s mother, Isobel, was instantly friendly and chirpy, a lively, gregarious character who delighted in meeting Stephen’s friends and accepting them into the fold.

Despite the fact that the groom had to lean on a cane for the wedding photographs, the couple looked much the same as any other on their wedding day. In the black-and-white photographs Hawking is wearing a dark suit and a thin, neatly knotted tie, his dark-rimmed glasses and thin face giving him an owlish look. Jane stands beside him, hands clutching a bouquet of flowers, her veil pushed back to reveal shoulder-length hair curled outward above the neckline of her short wedding dress in the fashion of the day. Hawking looks at the camera with a proud expression, a stare of deep-rooted determination and ambition—a stance that says, “This is just the beginning.” Jane smiles happily at the lens, equally sure, in her own gentler way, that they will make out and overcome all adversity.

Of course they both knew, as did all the others on that day, that Stephen might die within a short time. In fact, according to the medical predictions he was already living on borrowed time. But such thoughts were only a distant shadow that summer’s day in Cambridge, and Jane and Stephen Hawking were as sure as any other newly married couple that they would create a successful and happy life for themselves and that because of their circumstances they would make the very most of every moment they had together.

A fellow’s salary is no princely sum, and in 1965 foreign holidays were still relatively unusual, so the newlyweds honeymooned in Suffolk for a week. Immediately afterward it was back to work, because the couple had to leave for a summer school in general relativity that Hawking was due to attend at Cornell University, in upstate New York. Hawking recalls that this was a mistake:

It put quite a strain on our marriage, especially as we stayed in a dormitory that was full of couples with noisy small children. However, the summer school was very useful for me because I met many of the leading people in the field.²

Brandon Carter attended the same summer school and got to know Jane much better than he had during her weekend visits to Cambridge. He remembers that she was rather inexperienced at the traditional tasks of a housewife. He recalls how, on one occasion, he came across her in the shared kitchen practically pulling her hair out trying to make tea without a teapot. Carter found a saucepan in a cupboard and showed her how to brew tea camping style. One of the fondest memories he has of that summer school is the look of indignation on Jane’s face.

The idea of a summer school is to introduce the latest ideas to research students and fellows from universities around the world. They are usually attended by the most eminent people in a given field and help to set scientists thinking about how to apply new dis-

coveries to their own work. Hawking was getting into his stride as a physicist at this point in his career and, despite domestic difficulties, it was perfect timing as far as his cosmological ideas were concerned. He returned inspired to Caius and his first job.

However, upon their return there was a whole new set of domestic problems to face. The first of these was the matter of where the Hawkings were to live. Jane was still a student in her third and final year at Westfield College in London, so the plan was for her to stay in London during the week, while Stephen looked after himself, and, just as in the days before their marriage, she would return on weekends. The immediate problem was to find suitable accommodation in a university city where accommodation was always at a premium.

Before leaving for America, Hawking had gone to see the Bursar again to ask for assistance in finding somewhere to live, only to be told that it was against college policy to help fellows with housing. Because Stephen could not use a bicycle and was only able to walk short distances assisted by a pair of sticks, it was, of course, essential for the Hawkings to live in central Cambridge, close to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics on Silver Street. But as far as the college authorities were concerned, their latest fellow’s disabilities made no difference. Then, just before the trip to Cornell, they had heard of a new block of flats being built a short distance from the DAMTP and had put their names down for an apartment there. When they arrived back in Cambridge the Hawkings discovered that the flats would not be ready for several months.

In desperation, Hawking went back to the Bursar, who finally made the concession of arranging for the couple to stay in rooms in a hostel for graduate students. It seems, however, that the Bursar was still smarting over Hawking’s cheek in asking what he would be paid for his fellowship. The normal price for a room was twelve

shillings and six pence (63p) per night, but he charged the Hawkings double because there were two of them, even though Jane planned to stay there only on weekends.

In the event, they stayed in the hostel for just three nights because they discovered that a small house had become available nearby in a tiny street of picturesque old houses named Little St. Mary’s Lane. Less than a hundred yards from the DAMTP, it suited them perfectly. The house was owned by one of the other Cambridge colleges, which had let it to one its own fellows. He had now bought and moved into a larger house in the suburbs and agreed to sublet the property for the remaining three months of his lease.

During their stay there they heard news of another house that had become available on the same street. An elderly neighbor who had befriended the couple discovered their housing problems and contacted the owner of the empty house just a few doors along Little St. Mary’s Lane. Incensed by the idea that a struggling young couple should have such problems when a house remained unoccupied only a few yards away, the neighbor summoned the owner to Cambridge and insisted that the house be rented to the Hawkings and at a reasonable price. Once again problems had been turned on their head. They moved in when the three-month contract for the first house had run its course and remained there for many years.

The actual process of moving house was quite a problem, even if it was only a few doors along the same street. Their friends all mucked in, carrying furniture along the pavement and arranging it in the new place while Stephen leaned on his sticks, giving instructions and acting the part of foreman, shouting orders in his best coxswain’s voice. Brandon Carter and Martin Rees both lent a hand, as did another friend, Bob Donovan, a chemistry postgraduate who had made friends with Stephen and Jane before their marriage.

The new house was another tiny, ancient building. The front door opened directly into a sitting room, and there was a kitchen at the rear. A winding narrow staircase led up to the master bedroom on the first floor; beyond that, on the second floor, were a couple of smaller rooms. The Hawkings had very little furniture, and a large dining table took up most of the space in the sitting room. The walls were painted in soft shades; bright prints were hung around the room to give a splash of color between sets of shelves lined with rows of books and records. The ceilings were low, and tall visitors had to crouch under doorways to avoid a bump on the head.

The Hawkings have always been enthusiastic hosts, and the tiny house was frequently crowded with friends who would come for supper or lunch on weekends, all gathered around the dining table, trying to avoid talking shop but not always succeeding. Brandon Carter remembers the house on Little St. Mary’s Lane as a very cheerful place, where friends would all help out with the preparation of meals and the washing up, the strains of Wagner or Mahler playing in the background.

Meanwhile, Hawking’s work on black holes was progressing well. In December 1965 he was invited to give a talk at a relativity meeting in Miami. Jane was on her Christmas vacation from Westfield College, and although she was working toward her finals that coming summer she decided to go to America with her husband.

By the time of the Miami meeting, Hawking’s speech had deteriorated to a severe slur, and he was concerned that the audience would find it difficult to understand him. Fortunately one of his old friends, George Ellis, was spending a year at the University of Texas at Austin and would also be attending the Miami meeting. After a discussion in their hotel room, it was agreed that Ellis would give the talk on Hawking’s behalf. It was a resounding success and, with the ink still wet on his Ph.D. diploma, Hawking’s work on

singularity theory was enthusiastically received by some of the most eminent scientists gathered there from all over the world.

In Miami they stayed at the Fountainbleau Hotel, which had recently been used in the filming of the James Bond movie Goldfinger. It was a large hotel with a private beach. On one of their free days during the conference, George Ellis and his new wife spent the afternoon on the beach with Stephen and Jane. Around six o’clock in the evening, the spectacular red disc of the sun low in the west, they decided to return to the hotel for supper, only to find that the beach gates had been locked. A quick search for a way off the beach showed them that the only way they could get back into the hotel was through an open kitchen window at the side of the building. The problem was, how on earth were they to get Stephen, who could not even walk without the aid of sticks, through the window and back to their rooms?

They managed somehow to clamber through the opening and were halfway to getting Stephen through when they discovered that they were being watched by some Hispanic cleaners, who were not exactly pleased to see a weird-looking group of people struggling to get what looked like a lifeless body in through the kitchen window. Never were the Hawkings and the Ellises more thankful that Jane was studying modern languages. As soon as she realized the nationality of the cleaners, she began to talk to them in fluent Spanish and rapidly explained their predicament. Once they understood what was going on they were entirely hospitable, helped to get Stephen into the hotel kitchen, and even guided the foursome back to their rooms.

George Ellis invited the Hawkings to stay in Texas for a short holiday. Jane was not due back in London until January, so they decided to go along. They spent a week in Texas, sightseeing and relaxing after a tiring term in their respective careers. The four of them went on long drives in the Ellises’ car through the dramatic,

rugged Texas landscape, drinking cold beers at remote desert bars and window shopping in the Austin shopping malls.

Upon their return to Cambridge, the realities of life hit them hard. Jane had to return almost immediately to London, and the old system of weekend visits began again.

During the first year of their marriage Jane really came into her own. She managed to continue with her studies and graduated in the summer of 1966. During that time she also typed up Stephen’s Ph.D. thesis and continued to travel back to Cambridge every weekend and during holidays. In the summer of 1966, she was at last able to live with her husband throughout the week in their home on Little St. Mary’s Lane.

Meanwhile, Stephen’s condition had begun to worsen. The nature of the disease is such that in many cases it progresses in irregular leaps. A period of little change, which may last for years, may be followed by a rapid decline and then a leveling off. Since his diagnosis and early deterioration, Hawking’s symptoms had remained more or less constant, but in the latter half of the 1960s another rapid decline occurred. He had to take to using crutches rather than sticks in order to get around. At this point his father became disillusioned and impatient with the advice his son was receiving from the medical profession and decided to take over Stephen’s treatment. He carried out intensive research into ALS and prescribed a course of steroids and vitamins that Stephen continued to take until his father’s death in 1986.

He was finding it increasingly difficult to negotiate the winding staircase to their bedroom on the first floor on Little St. Mary’s Lane. Friends who visited the couple for the evening began to appreciate just how much Stephen’s condition had deteriorated as they saw him struggling across the sitting room and up the stairs when he decided to retire for the night. One acquaintance has recalled that he watched in shock as Hawking took a full fifteen

minutes to make the journey from the first stair to his bedroom door. He would never allow himself to be helped on these occasions and utterly rejected any behavior that singled him out as anything other than a normal, able-bodied man. Jane and their friends respected this attitude, but it could become frustrating at times. Hawking’s determination and single mindedness could often be misconstrued as arrogance and bloody mindedness. The writer John Boslough has described Hawking as “the toughest man I have ever met.”³ And Jane has said, “Some would call his attitude determination, some obstinacy. I’ve called it both at one time or another. I suppose that’s what keeps him going.”⁴

At the DAMTP and in Cambridge academic circles, Hawking was beginning to cultivate a “difficult genius” image, and his reputation as successor to Einstein, although embryonic, was already beginning to follow him around. People who knew him in those days remember him as a friendly and cheerful character, but already his natural brashness, coupled with his physical disabilities, was beginning to create communication difficulties with many of those around him.

He was quite outspoken when attending talks given by internationally famous and highly respected figures in the world of physics. Where most young researchers would be happy to accept the words of the great quietly, Hawking would ask deep, often embarrassingly penetrating questions. Instead of alienating him from his seniors, this behavior, quite rightly, gained him a great deal of respect and helped to increase his standing in the eyes of his superiors. However, it could be quite intimidating to some of his contemporaries. On occasion some colleagues felt a little shy about asking him to go for a beer at the pub.

Hawking’s great personal gift is to be able to make light of his disabilities and always to have a cheerful and positive outlook on life. He simply refuses to let his condition get him down. In physics

he has a perfect displacement activity. By keeping himself totally preoccupied with the nature and origin of the cosmos and playing what he calls the “game of Universe,” he does not allow himself to spend time and energy thinking about his state of health. Once, when asked whether he ever became depressed over his condition, he replied, “Not normally. I have managed to do what I wanted to do despite it, and that gives a feeling of achievement.”⁵ Despite the gradual deterioration in his speech and increasing muscular atrophy, to his close friends he was the same Stephen Hawking they had known since his early Cambridge days, and those who really understood him felt the warmth of his personality.

Both Jane and Stephen knew that they should not waste any time in starting a family once they were married, and their first child, a boy they named Robert, was born in 1967.

This event was another turning point in Hawking’s life. Only four years after he was diagnosed as having a terminal illness and a life expectancy of two years, his reputation as a physicist was in the ascendant; he had retained, by sheer determination and willpower, a degree of independence and mobility; and now, against all odds, he was a father. As Jane has observed, “It obviously gave Stephen a great new impetus, being responsible for this tiny creature.”⁶ Everything seemed to be going well for him. His career was blossoming, and with every new paper he published a further barrier in our understanding of the Universe was broken down. His reputation as a promising new name in the world of physics was reinforced with each fresh breakthrough. And now he had a son to add to the happiness of his married life.

For Jane these events were not quite so elevating. To her fell the burden of raising a child, keeping the home together, and caring for a severely disabled husband who could do nothing to help her. She is quoted as saying:

When I married him I knew there was not going to be the possibility of my having a career, that our household could only accommodate one career and that had to be Stephen’s. Nevertheless, I have to say I found it very difficult and very frustrating in those early years. I felt myself very much the household drudge, and Stephen was getting all the glittering prizes.⁷

On another occasion she said:

I can imagine how frustrating it must be for some physicists’ wives when they expect help from able-bodied husbands that is not forthcoming. I have no illusions on that score, so it doesn’t trouble me unduly.⁸

However, it would be many years before the inevitable tensions that were brewing would break to the surface.

The couple decided to buy the house in Little St. Mary’s Lane. Hawking swallowed his pride and returned to the Bursary at Caius to ask the college for a mortgage. They conducted a survey of the property, decided that it would not be a sound investment, and turned him down. Once again, his status as a fellow was opening up very few “real life” privileges. Undeterred, they went to a building society for the loan and were granted a mortgage. Stephen’s parents gave them the money to do up the house, and the usual gang of friends once more helped out, this time with wallpapering and painting.

Although the house was small, they remained there for a number of years until, in the mid-seventies, it became too cramped for the growing family. But in the meantime it served their purposes as well as it had ever done. Newly decorated, it was even cozier than it had been as a rented property, and—what was more important—it was now their own home, providing a secure environment in which they could begin to raise a family.

The sixties were a great time to be alive and young. They were a time of tremendous, although in some ways misplaced, hope, an era

of reawakening two decades on from the end of the Second World War and all the privations that followed, a time of fresh beginnings and optimism in all spheres of life. The second half of the decade heralded the first real counter-cultural revolution in the West, bringing with it new music, new art, and new literature. A few years earlier, the trial surrounding the censorship of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover had seen the dam of elitism and Victorian morality burst wide open with the immortal question, “Is it a book you would wish your wife or your servant to read?” The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and, so it seemed, half the youth of Britain and America were experimenting with psychedelic drugs; dresses were getting shorter and hair longer.

The Hawkings and their friends in Cambridge showed little interest in fashion and pop music, although Jane was keen on minidresses and the latest hairstyles. But in the world of science things were also on the move. George Ellis clearly remembers watching the maiden flight of the British Concorde in April 1969 and being filled with excitement at the new technology taking the world by storm. Then, only a few months later, they sat glued to their TV screens to watch the “one small step” of Neil Armstrong when the lunar module, Eagle, landed in the Sea of Tranquility, 240,000 miles away on the surface of the Moon. “The Eagle has landed,” he said. “The surface is like a fine powder. It has a soft beauty all its own, like some desert in the United States.” At that moment, anything seemed possible.

The Hawkings and the Ellises went on holiday together in 1969. Foreign holidays were suddenly in vogue because of drastically reduced prices, and it had become very fashionable to take a package trip to such destinations as Spain or its outlying islands, especially Majorca. The two families flew to Palma airport, Majorca, and spent a short break walking through the unspoiled almond groves, sampling the local wine and sunning themselves on the

clean, unmolested beaches, almost untouched by visiting Anglo-Saxons and certainly lager-lout-free.

Hawking was working harder than he had ever worked before, and it was paying dividends. In 1966 he won the Adams Prize for an essay entitled “Singularities and the Geometry of Spacetime.” Much of his research during this period was a continuation of the work that had yielded the astonishing last chapter of his Ph.D. thesis. He spent most of this time in collaboration with Roger Penrose, who was by then professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College in London.

One of the major difficulties the two of them faced was that they had to devise new mathematical techniques in order to carry out the calculations necessary to verify their theories—to make them empirically sound and not just ideas. Einstein had experienced a similar problem fifty years earlier with the mathematics of general relativity. He, like Hawking, was not a particularly brilliant mathematician. Fortunately for Hawking, however, Penrose was. In fact, he was fundamentally a mathematician rather than a physicist, but at the deep level at which the two subjects become almost indistinguishable.

It really boils down to a difference in approach. Hawking’s way of working is largely intuitive—he just knows if an idea is correct or not. He has an amazing feel for the subject, a bit like a musician playing by ear. Penrose thinks and works in a different way, more like a concert pianist following a musical score. The two approaches meshed perfectly and soon began to produce some very interesting results on the nature of the early Universe. As Dennis Sciama once put it, “[The theories] required very highbrow methods, at least by the standards of theoretical physicists.”⁹ Penrose liked to work in a highly visual way, using diagrams and pictures, which suited Hawking fine. He always felt more at home with visual representations than with mathematical formulas. It was also

so much easier for him to manipulate these pictures rather than trying to work with equations that he could not write out and had to retain in his head.

Since his undergraduate days Hawking has been a keen follower of the philosopher Karl Popper. The main thrust of Popper’s philosophy of science is that the traditional approach to the subject, “the scientific method” as originally espoused by the likes of Newton and Galileo, is in fact inadequate.

The traditional approach to science can be broken down into six stages. First comes an observation or an experiment. Scientists then try to devise a general theory to explain by induction what they have observed and go on to propose a hypothesis based on this general theory. Next come attempts to verify this hypothesis by further experimentation. The original theory is thus proved or disproved, and the scientist then assumes the truth or otherwise of the matter until proven wrong.

Popper stands this process on its head and suggests the following approach. Take a problem. Propose a solution or a theory to explain what is happening. Work out what testable propositions you can deduce from your theory. Carry out tests or experiments on these deductions in order not to prove them but to refute them. The refutations, combined with the original theory, will yield a better one.

The primary difference between the two approaches is that, according to the traditional scientific method, after making an observation the scientist attempts to verify a theory by further experiment. In Popper’s system, the scientist tries to disprove the theory in an attempt to find a better one. It is this aspect of Popper’s thought that is so appealing to Hawking and many other scientists, and he has often applied it in his own scientific work. The science writer Dennis Overbye once asked him how his mind worked. In reply, Hawking said:

Sometimes I make a conjecture and then try to prove it. Many times, in trying to prove it, I find a counter-example, then I have to change my conjecture. Sometimes it is something that other people have made attempts on. I find that many papers are obscure and I simply don’t understand them. So, I have to try to translate them into my own way of thinking. Many times I have an idea and start working on a paper and then I will realize halfway through that there’s a lot more to it.

I work very much on intuition, thinking that, well, a certain idea ought to be right. Then I try to prove it. Sometimes I find I’m wrong. Sometimes I find that the original idea was wrong, but that leads to new ideas. I find it a great help to discuss my ideas with other people. Even if they don’t contribute anything, just having to explain it to someone else helps me sort it out for myself.¹⁰

Little did he know, at the end of the 1960s, just how important his ideas would soon prove to be.