World-famous British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who died on
Wednesday at the age of 76. He was known as much for his profound and
witty comments as his scientific discoveries. PHOTO | ANDREW COWIE |
AFP
Stephen W
Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who
roamed the
cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76.
“Not
since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public
imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around
the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City
University of New York, said in an interview.
Hawking did that largely through his book A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,
published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired
a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The
Theory of Everything,” was nominated for several Academy Awards, and
Eddie Redmayne, who played Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor.
Scientifically,
Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it
might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not
black? When it explodes.
What is
equally amazing is that he had a career at all. As a graduate student in
1963, he learned he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neuromuscular
wasting disease also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. He was given only a
few years to live.
MENTAL FACULTIES UNTOUCHED
The
disease reduced his bodily control to the flexing of a finger and
voluntary eye movements but left his mental faculties untouched.
He
went on to become his generation’s leader in exploring gravity and the
properties of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits so deep and
dense that not even light can escape them.
That
work led to a turning point in modern physics, playing itself out in
the closing months of 1973 on the walls of his brain when Hawking set
out to apply quantum theory, the weird laws that govern subatomic
reality, to black holes.
In a long
and daunting calculation, Hawking discovered to his befuddlement that
black holes — those mythological avatars of cosmic doom — were not
really black at all. In fact, he found, they would eventually fizzle,
leaking radiation and particles, and finally explode and disappear over
the eons.
That calculation, in a
thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title “Black
Hole Explosions?,” is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark
in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity
and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the
small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had
thought.
The discovery of Hawking
radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It
transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers —
and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.
“You
can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,”
Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don’t think he will
survive it.
“On the other hand,”
he added, “if we send someone off to jump into a black hole, neither he
nor his constituent atoms will come back, but his mass energy will come
back. Maybe that applies to the whole universe.”
'BEAUTIFUL PAPER'
Dennis
W Sciama, a cosmologist and Hawking’s thesis adviser at Cambridge,
called Hawking’s thesis in Nature “the most beautiful paper in the
history of physics.”
In 2002, Hawking said he wanted the formula for Hawking radiation to be engraved on his tombstone.
He
was a man who pushed the limits — in his intellectual life, to be sure,
but also in his professional and personal lives. He travelled the globe
to scientific meetings, visiting every continent, including Antarctica;
wrote best-selling books about his work; married twice; fathered three
children; and was not above appearing on “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek: The
Next Generation” or “The Big Bang Theory.”
He
celebrated his 60th birthday by going up in a hot-air balloon. The same
week, he also crashed his electric-powered wheelchair while speeding
around a corner in Cambridge, breaking his leg.
In
April 2007, a few months after his 65th birthday, he took part in a
zero-gravity flight aboard a specially equipped Boeing 727, a padded
aircraft that flies a roller-coaster trajectory to produce fleeting
periods of weightlessness. It was a prelude to a hoped-for trip to space
with Richard Branson’s VirginGalactic company aboard SpaceShipTwo.
Asked
why he took such risks, Hawking said, “I want to show that people need
not be limited by physical handicaps as long as they are not disabled in
spirit.”
His own spirit left many in awe.
“What
a triumph his life has been,” said Martin Rees, a Cambridge University
cosmologist, the astronomer royal of Britain and Hawking’s longtime
colleague. “His name will live in the annals of science; millions have
had their cosmic horizons widened by his best-selling books; and even
more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of
achievement against all the odds — a manifestation of amazing willpower
and determination.”
Stephen
William Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942 — 300
years to the day, he liked to point out, after the death of Galileo, who
had begun the study of gravity. His mother, the former Isobel Walker,
had gone to Oxford to avoid the bombs that fell nightly during the Blitz
of London. His father, Frank Hawking, was a prominent research
biologist.
The oldest of four
children, Stephen was a mediocre student at St Albans School in London,
although his innate brilliance was recognised by some classmates and
teachers.
Later, at University
College, Oxford, he found his studies in mathematics and physics so easy
that he rarely consulted a book or took notes. He got by with a
thousand hours of work in three years, or one hour a day, he estimated.
“Nothing seemed worth making an effort for,” he said.
The
only subject he found exciting was cosmology because, he said, it dealt
with “the big question: Where did the universe come from?”
Upon
graduation, he moved to Cambridge. Before he could begin his research,
however, he was stricken by what his research adviser, Sciama, came to
call “that terrible thing.”
The
young Hawking had been experiencing occasional weakness and falling
spells for several years. Shortly after his 21st birthday, in 1963,
doctors told him that he had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. They gave
him less than three years to live.
His
first response was severe depression. He dreamed he was going to be
executed, he said. Then, against all odds, the disease appeared to
stabilise. Although he was slowly losing control of his muscles, he was
still able to walk short distances and perform simple tasks, although
labouriously, like dressing and undressing. He felt a new sense of
purpose.
“When you are faced with
the possibility of an early death,” he recalled, “it makes you realise
that life is worth living and that there are a lot of things you want to
do.”
In 1965, he married Jane
Wilde, a student of linguistics. Now, by his own account, he not only
had “something to live for” but also had to find a job, which gave him
an incentive to work seriously toward his doctorate.
His
illness, however, had robbed him of the ability to write down the long
chains of equations that are the tools of the cosmologist’s trade.
Characteristically, he turned this handicap into a strength, gathering
his energies for daring leaps of thought, which, in his later years, he
often left for others to codify in proper mathematical language.
“People
have the mistaken impression that mathematics is just equations,”
Hawking said. “In fact, equations are just the boring part of
mathematics.”
By necessity, he
concentrated on problems that could be attacked through “pictures and
diagrams,” adopting geometric techniques to study general relativity,
Einstein’s theory of gravity.
The
discovery of black hole radiation also led to a 30-year controversy over
the fate of things that had fallen into a black hole.
Hawking
initially said that detailed information about whatever had fallen in
would be lost forever because the particles coming out would be
completely random, erasing whatever patterns had been present when they
first fell in.
Many particle
physicists protested that this violated a tenet of quantum physics,
which says that knowledge is always preserved and can be retrieved.
Leonard
Susskind, a Stanford physicist who carried on the argument for decades,
characterised Hawking to his face as “one of the most obstinate people
in the world; no, he is the most infuriating person in the universe.”
Hawking grinned.
In 1974, Hawking
was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific
organisation; in 1982, he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of
Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton. “They say
it’s Newton’s chair, but obviously it’s been changed,” he liked to say.
Having
conquered black holes, Hawking set his sights on the origin of the
universe and on eliminating that pesky singularity at the beginning of
time from models of cosmology. If the laws of physics could break down
there, they could break down everywhere.
With
James Hartle of the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara,
California, Hawking envisioned the history of the universe as a sphere
like the Earth. Cosmic time corresponds to latitude, starting with zero
at the North Pole and progressing southward.
Although
time started there, the North Pole was nothing special; the same laws
applied there as everywhere else. Asking what happened before the Big
Bang, Hawking said, was like asking what was a mile north of the North
Pole — it was not any place, or any time.
In
“A Brief History of Time,” Hawking concluded that “if we do discover a
complete theory” of the universe it would be the ultimate triumph of
human reason — for then we would know the mind of God.”
Until
1974, Hawking was still able to feed himself and to get in and out of
bed. At Jane’s insistence, he would drag himself, hand over hand, up the
stairs to the bedroom in his Cambridge home every night, in an effort
to preserve his remaining muscle tone. After 1980, care was supplemented
by nurses.
VOICE PERMANENTLY SILENCED
Hawking
retained some control over his speech up to 1985. But on a trip to
Switzerland, he came down with pneumonia. The doctors asked Jane if she
wanted his life support turned off, but she said no. To save his life,
doctors inserted a breathing tube. He survived, but his voice was
permanently silenced.
It appeared
for a time that he would be able to communicate only by pointing at
individual letters on an alphabet board. But when a computer expert,
Walter Woltosz, heard about Hawking’s condition, he offered him a
program he had written called Equalizer. By clicking a switch with his
still-functioning fingers, Hawking was able to browse through menus that
contained all the letters and more than 2,500 words.
Word
by word — and, when necessary, letter by letter — he could build up
sentences on the computer screen and send them to a speech synthesiser
that vocalised for him. The entire apparatus was fitted to his motorised
wheelchair.
Even when too weak to
move a finger, he communicated through the computer by way of an
infrared beam, which he activated by twitching his right cheek or
blinking his eye. The system was expanded to allow him to open and close
the doors in his office and to use the telephone and internet without
aid.
Although he averaged fewer
than 15 words per minute, Hawking found he could speak through the
computer better than he had before losing his voice. His only complaint,
he confided, was that the speech synthesiser, manufactured in
California, had given him an American accent.
One of the reasons he wrote A Brief History of Time to
earn enough money to pay for his children’s education. He did. The
book’s extraordinary success made him wealthy, a hero to disabled people
everywhere and even more famous.
The
news media followed his movements and activities over the years. Asked
by New Scientist magazine what he thought about most, Hawking answered:
“Women. They are a complete mystery.”
In 1990, Hawking and his wife separated after 25 years of marriage; Jane Hawking wrote about their years together in two books, Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen Hawking and Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen. The latter became the basis of the 2014 movie The Theory of Everything.
In
1995, he married Elaine Mason, a nurse who had cared for him since his
bout of pneumonia. She had been married to David Mason, the engineer who
had attached Hawking’s speech synthesiser to his wheelchair.
In
2004, British newspapers reported that the Cambridge police were
investigating allegations that Elaine had abused Hawking, but no charges
were filed, and Hawking denied the accusations. They agreed to divorce
in 2006.
A complete list of
survivors was not immediately available, but Wednesday morning, his
children, Robert, Lucy and Tim, released a statement:
“We
are deeply saddened that our beloved father passed away today. He was a
great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will
live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance
and humour inspired people across the world. He once said, ‘It would not
be much of a universe if it wasn’t home to the people you love.’ We
will miss him forever.”
Among his
many honours, Hawking was named a commander of the British Empire in
1982. In the summer of 2012, he had a star role in the opening of the
Paralympics Games in London. The only thing lacking was the Nobel Prize,
and his explanation for this was characteristically pithy: “The Nobel
is given only for theoretical work that has been confirmed by
observation. It is very, very difficult to observe the things I have
worked on.”
Hawking was a strong
advocate of space exploration, saying it was essential to the long-term
survival of the human race. “Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing
risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear
war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet
thought of,” he told an audience in Hong Kong in 2007.
Nothing
raised as much furor, however, as his increasingly scathing remarks
about religion. One attraction of the no-boundary proposal for Hawking
was that there was no need to appeal to anything outside the universe,
like God, to explain how it began.
In A Brief History of Time,
he had referred to the “mind of God,” but in “The Grand Design,” a 2011
book he wrote with Leonard Mlodinow, he was bleaker about religion. “It
is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper,” he
wrote, referring to the British term for a firecracker fuse, “and set
the universe going.”
He went
further in an interview that year in The Guardian, saying: “I regard the
brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail.
There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a
fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Having spent the best part of his life grappling with black holes and cosmic doom, Hawking had no fear of the dark.
© 2018 New York Times News Service (Matthew Haag, Matt Stevens and Gerald Jonas contributed reporting).
No comments :
Post a Comment