A Brief History of Genius

My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21 — everything since then has been a bonus. Stephen Hawking

Because every day could be my last, I have the desire to make the most of each and every minute. I try to lead as normal a life as possible, and not think about my condition, or regret the things it prevents me from doing, which are not that many. My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all. Stephen Hawking

STEPHEN Hawking, who sought to explain the origin of the universe, the mysteries of black holes and the prospect of time travel, died on Wednesday aged 76.

Hawking’s formidable mind probed the very limits of human understanding both in the vastness of space and in the bizarre sub-molecular world of quantum theory, which he said could predict what happens at the beginning and end of time.

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Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942. He grew up in and around London. After studying physics at Oxford University, he was in his first year of research work at Cambridge when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neurone disease, at 21. Hawking was confined to a wheelchair for most of his life.

As his condition worsened, he had to speak through a voice synthesiser and communicate by moving his eyebrows — but at the same time became the world’s most recognisable scientist.

Hawking died peacefully at his home in the British university city of Cambridge in the early hours of Wednesday.

“He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years,” his children Lucy, Robert and Tim said. “His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world.”

Hawking shot to international fame after the 1988 publication of “A Brief History of Time”, one of the most complex books ever to achieve mass appeal, which stayed on the Sunday Times best-sellers’ list for no fewer than 237 weeks.

“My original aim was to write a book that would sell on airport bookstalls,” he told reporters at the time. “In order to make sure it was understandable I tried the book out on my nurses. I think they understood most of it.”

The physicist’s disease spurred him to work harder but also contributed to the collapse of his two marriages, he wrote in a 2013 memoir, “My Brief History”.

In the book, he related how he was first diagnosed: “I felt it was very unfair — why should this happen to me.”

“At the time, I thought my life was over and that I would never realise the potential I felt I had. But now, 50 years later, I can be quietly satisfied with my life.”

US space agency NASA said: “His theories unlocked a universe of possibilities that we and the world are exploring.” Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, said: “We have lost a colossal mind and a wonderful spirit.”

Hawking’s popular recognition became such that he appeared as himself on the television show “Star Trek: Next Generation” and his cartoon caricature appeared on “The Simpsons”. He narrated a segment of the opening ceremony of the London Paralympic Games in August 2012, the year he turned 70.

A 2014 film, “The Theory of Everything”, with Eddie Redmayne playing Hawking, charted the onset of his illness and his early life as the brilliant student grappling with black holes and the concept of time.

“We have lost a truly beautiful mind, an astonishing scientist and the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet,” Redmayne said.

Since 1974, Hawking worked extensively on marrying the two cornerstones of modern physics — Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which concerns gravity and large-scale phenomena, and quantum theory, which covers subatomic particles.

As a result of that research, Hawking proposed a model of the universe based on two concepts of time: “real time”, or time as human beings experience it, and quantum theory’s “imaginary time”, on which the world may really run.

“Imaginary time may sound like science fiction... but it is a genuine scientific concept,” he wrote in a lecture paper.

He caused some controversy among biologists when he said he saw computer viruses as a life form, and thus the human race’s first act of creation.

Another major area of his research was into black holes, the regions of space-time where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.

When asked whether God had a place in his work, Hawking once said: “In a way, if we understand the universe, we are in the position of God.”

He married undergraduate Jane Wilde in July 1965 and the couple had Robert, Lucy and Timothy. But Hawking tells in his 2013 memoir how Wilde became more and more depressed as her husband’s condition worsened.

“She was worried I was going to die soon and wanted someone who would give her and the children support and marry her when I was gone,” he wrote.

Wilde took up with a local musician and gave him a room in the family apartment, Hawking said. “I would have objected but I too was expecting an early death...,” he said.

He divorced Wilde in 1990 and in 1995 married one of his nurses Elaine Mason, whose ex-husband David had designed the electronic voice synthesiser that allowed him to communicate.

“My marriage to Elaine was passionate and tempestuous,” he wrote in the memoir. “We had our ups and downs but Elaine’s being a nurse saved my life on several occasions.” It also took its emotional toll on her, he noted, and the pair divorced in 2007. 

In his memoir, he wrote: “I became possibly the best-known scientist in the world. This is partly because scientists, apart from Einstein, are not widely known rock stars, and partly because I fit the stereotype of a disabled genius.” — Reuters

Why Physics Nobel eluded him

• For Hawking, who redefined cosmology by proposing that black holes are mortal, the Nobel Prize for Physics remained elusive as his theory cannot be observed or verified
• Even though his theory is now firmly accepted in theoretical physics, there was no way to verify if black holes are mortal
• “Black holes are too long-lived to be observed today in their death throes,” says Timothy Ferris in book “The Science of Liberty”
• “Hawking probably would have won the prize had nature provided observational confirmation. But that won’t happen for billions of years, not until the first star-size black holes start exploding,” Ferris writes
• The Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously