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Professor Hawking is a very slow writer
On the afternoon of September 23, 2014, a few minutes before his
lecture at the Magma auditorium in Los Pueblos in Tenerife, Stephen
William Hawking was rewriting parts of his speech. Hawking, who is
unusual in being both a theoretical physicist working on some of
the most fundamental problems in physics (his most recent
paper, in January 2014, was titled "Information preservation
and weather forecasting for black holes") and being very famous, is
a slow writer.
He operates his computer by moving his right cheek muscle. The
movements are detected by an infrared sensor attached to his
spectacles allowing him to move a cursor on a computer screen
attached to his wheelchair. He painstakingly builds sentences at a
rate of a few words per minute, a speed that might be slowly
decreasing as his muscle control deteriorates. His condition is a
consequence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka motor neurone
disease), an illness from which he has suffered since the age of 21
(he took part in the ALS ice bucket challenge in August by
volunteering his children: "Because I had pneumonia last year it
would not be wise for me to have a bucket of cold water poured over
me"). His Tenerife lecture was titled "The quantum creation of the
Universe". The 1,500-capacity auditorium was packed.
"He was changing the content at the very last minute so we
panicked a bit," says Jonathan Wood, Hawking's graduate assistant,
a position which involves a variety of responsibilities, from
technical assistance to managing social media. "He always does
that. I produce the PowerPoint slides because he can't. I'm not a
physicist, so often he will be talking about things that I don't
understand and he'll have to explain what slides he wants." The
lecture was part of the second edition of Starmus, a six-day
science festival that gathered a group of eminent scientists,
including physics Nobel laureate John Mather, biologist Richard
Dawkins and Queen guitarist Brian May, who is an expert in
three-dimensional astronomy. But the star turn was Hawking.
As he made his way to the stage, helped by his entourage of
nurses and assistants, a giant screen showed a video montage which
included visualisations of black-hole collisions and footage shot
from Hawking's point-of-view in his wheelchair, with "Hole in the
Sky", by the doom-metal band AtomA, blaring throughout the
hall.
Hawking always starts his lectures with the same quip: "Can you
hear me?" Hawking managed to be characteristically funny while
guiding the audience through the bold ideas he has developed about
the origins of the Universe over the past decades. This delivery, a
blend of humour and complicated theoretical physics, is the kind of
performance that Hawking, 72, is now well-known for, even as he has
become a celebrity ambassador for science, a physicist whose office
is adorned with portraits taken with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and
Steven Spielberg (twice) as well as stills from his many
appearances in Star Trek andThe Simpsons.
Stephen Hawking in "Anthology of Interest I", episode 16, series two of Futurama, in 2000
"I attended his famous inaugural lecture: 'Is the end in sight
for theoretical physics?'" says physicist Neil Turok, a longtime
friend and collaborator. "The whole lecture was given in a very
amusing tone, really nothing more to it than a series of jokes. He
was bold and naïve and stuck his neck out and said he thought
within 20 years it would all be wrapped up. Twenty years later, he
gave another lecture, titled 'Is the end of theoretical physics
finally in sight?' He conceded he probably had to wait another 20
years."
Hawking's public persona manages to combine Carl Sagan's popular
appeal with Richard Feynman's maverick brilliance for theoretical
insight. He has deftly packaged his theories and thoughts (he is
known to be able to reflect deeply about physics even when engaged
in social events) in popular books, from A Brief History of
Time -- a bestseller which almost single-handedly
launched the popular-science publishing industry -- to The Grand
Design, co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow in 2010. These
books more than anything demonstrate Hawking's propensity for
concise and bold statements laced with an unconventional humour.
Here, for example, is Hawking deliberating on the idea of the
multiverse, the notion that the Universe doesn't have a unique
history, but rather that there exists a collection of all possible
histories of the Universe, all equally real and with their own set
of physical laws: "There might be one history in which the Moon is
made of Roquefort cheese," he writes. "But we have observed that
the Moon is not made of cheese, which is bad news for
mice."
Hawking's public role doesn't detract from the fact that, over
the past five decades, he has been one the boldest explorers of the
cosmos, at least in the realms of thought -- his mind roams in
theoretical dimensions that, for the most part, remain inaccessible
to experiment and direct observation. Through necessity (he's no
longer able to write equations), Hawking has developed an original
way of thinking about the mysteries of the cosmos, not relying so
much on equations as most physicists do, but preferring to think in
terms of pictures and geometries. Such tools are allied to an
approach that aims to make big, intuitive breakthroughs, rather
than incremental contributions, in our understanding of the
cosmos.
"He has pioneered completely new areas in physics," says Kip
Thorne, a physicist at Caltech and one of the world's foremost
experts in general relativity. "There were several key junctures in
his career when he'd make a huge breakthrough and everybody else
was struggling to catch up or struggling to understand."
The manner in which he blazed from breakthrough to breakthrough,
particularly in his most prolific period in the 70s and the 80s,
was unorthodox, as Hawking not only regularly demonstrated a
far-reaching insight, but also a penchant for dramatic about-turns.
Here is a theoretician who first proved that the Universe starts
with a singularity -- an event in space and time where all the laws
of physics break down -- and then, with collaborator James Hartle,
developed his "no boundary" proposal, which suggests that time
didn't exist before the Big Bang and, therefore, the Universe
doesn't have a beginning. ("It makes no sense to talk of a time
before the Universe began. It would be like asking for a point
south of the South Pole.")
He was also one of the first physicists to put forward a set of
laws for the dynamics of black holes, including one that stated
that black holes can never get smaller, but later discovered that
they can indeed get smaller -- in fact, they could evaporate
through radiation (known today as Hawking radiation). That result
was very contentious, generating a debate that lasted decades, as
evidenced by the title of a book published by the
physicist Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War: My Battle With
Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum
Mechanics.
Hawking and the other members of University College Boat Club, for whom he coxed.
WIRED met Stephen Hawking the day after his lecture; his nurse,
Patricia Dowdy, held his hand, to enable a light handshake, while
Jeanna York, his personal assistant, made the introductions. His
team has developed an idiosyncratic way of communicating with him,
asking mostly questions that require only a yes or no answer and
closely watching his facial expressions to interpret his thoughts
and feelings. Hawking travelled to Tenerife by boat (his doctor
forbade him from flying because of his health), a journey
that took six days.
He was in good spirits, frequently flashing a smile that defies
the stillness of his body. Exhaustion is probably the condition he
is most familiar with, but that has never stopped him from
extensive travelling, both physically and mentally. And that is
what perhaps defines him the most: his unbreakable persistence. "I
am just a child who has never grown up," he writes in his
autobiography, My Brief History. "I keep asking 'how' and
'why' questions. Occasionally, I find answers."
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EXCLUSIVE: WIRED meets Professor Stephen Hawking
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