Stephen Hawking (9 page)

Less than three years after arriving at Oxford University, Hawking again had to face the music when finals approached, and he suddenly found that he could have been better prepared. Dr. Berman knew that Hawking, for all his innate ability, would find the examinations harder than he anticipated. Berman realized that there were two types of student who did well at Oxford: those who were bright and worked very hard, and those who had great natural talent and worked very little. It was always the former who achieved greater things in written papers. That was the way of exams: winning end-of-year prizes was one thing, but finals were in a different league. They were all or nothing, the focal point of the whole three years of study. Hawking once calculated that during the entire three years of his course at Oxford he had done something like 1,000 hours' work, an average of one hour per day—hardly a foundation for the arduous finals. One friend remembers
with amusement, “Towards the end he was working as much as three hours a day!”

However, Hawking had devised a plan. Because candidates had a wide choice of questions from each paper, he would, he decided, attempt only theoretical-physics problems and ignore those requiring detailed factual knowledge. He knew that he could do any theoretical question by using his proven natural talent and intuitive understanding of the subject. But there was an additional problem to complicate things: he had applied to Cambridge to begin Ph.D. studies in cosmology under the most distinguished British astronomer of the day, Fred Hoyle. The catch was that to be accepted for Cambridge, he had to achieve a first-class honors degree, the highest possible qualification at Oxford.

The night before finals, Hawking panicked. He tossed and turned all night and got very little sleep. When morning came, he dressed up in subfusc (the regulation black gown, white shirt, and bow-tie worn by all examinees), left his rooms bleary-eyed and anxious, and headed for the examination halls a few yards along the High. Out on the street, hundreds of other identically dressed students streamed along the pavements, some clutching books under their arms, others puffing maniacally on their last cigarette before entering the examination hall—a feast for the tourist's camera but abject misery for those having to sit through days of examinations.

The examination halls themselves do their best to intimidate: high ceilings, great chandeliers hanging down from the void, row upon row of stark wooden desks and hard chairs. Invigilators pace up and down the rows, keeping an eagle eye on the candidates in their multitude of poses—staring at
the ceiling or the middle distance, pen protruding between clenched teeth, or terminally absorbed, hunched over a manuscript in a free-flow trance. Hawking woke up a little as the paper was placed on the desk before him and duly followed through his plan of attempting only the theoretical problems.

Exams over, he went off to celebrate the end of finals with the others of his year, guzzling champagne from the bottle and joining the throng of students ritualistically stopping the traffic on the High and spraying bubbly into the summer sky. After a short pause and a period of nail-biting anticipation, the results were announced. Hawking was on the borderline between a first and a second. To decide his fate, he would have to face a viva, a personal interview with the examiners.

He was fully aware of his image at the university. He had the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he was considered a difficult student in that he was scruffy and seemingly lazy, more interested in drinking and having fun than working seriously. However, he underestimated how highly thought of were his abilities. Not only that, but as Berman is fond of saying, Hawking was in his element at a viva, because if the examiners had any intelligence they would soon see that he was cleverer than they were. At the interview he made a pronouncement that perfectly encapsulates the man's matter-of-fact attitude and at the same time may have just saved his career. The chief examiner asked him to tell the board of his plans for the future.

“If you award me a first,” he said, “I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a first.”

They did.

4

DOCTORS AND DOCTORATES

I
t has been said that Cambridge is the only true university town in England. Oxford is a much larger city and has, lying beyond the ring road, heavy industrial areas nestling next to one of Europe's largest housing estates. Cambridge is altogether quainter and more thoroughly dominated by academia. Although evidence suggests that the University of Cambridge was established by defectors from Oxford, both seats of learning were created at around the same time in the twelfth century, using as their model the University of
Paris. Like Oxford, Cambridge University is a collection of colleges under the umbrella of a central university authority. Like Oxford, it attracts the very best scholars from around the world and has a global reputation, paralleled only by its great rival and historical twin a mere eighty miles away. And, like Oxford, it is steeped in tradition, drama, and history.

Having just returned from abroad, Stephen Hawking, B.A. (Hon.), arrived in Cambridge in October 1962, exchanging the scorched, barren landscape of the Middle East for autumnal wind and drizzle across the darkening fields of East Anglia. As he traveled past the meadows and gently rolling hills toward his new home that rainy morning, a darkening shadow hung skulking behind the peace and calm of the “only true university town in England,” and indeed behind every other human dwelling elsewhere on the planet, for the world was in the terrifying grip of the Cuba crisis.

It really did seem as though the world could end in a blaze of nuclear fury at any moment. In these relatively calm post-glasnost days, it is perhaps hard to imagine the atmosphere of the time, the insecurity, and the uncertainty. Hawking was no different from the next man in experiencing a sense of hopelessness in the face of events over which he had absolutely no control. Old idols, the beautiful and the good, were fading and falling; new heroes stood on the sidelines, ready to emerge. Marilyn Monroe had died in August that year, John F. Kennedy had little more than twelve months to live, and the Beatles were poised on the brink of huge international fame unparalleled in the history of popular culture.

Despite the overbearing threat of imminent annihilation, life in Cambridge went on pretty much as usual. Students
began to settle into their new homes and find their feet in a strange city; the townsfolk continued about their daily business as they had done for the thousand years during which the city had existed. In the days leading up to his move to Cambridge, with the world outside looking set to tear itself apart, Stephen Hawking was gradually becoming aware of an inner personal crisis. Toward the end of his time at Oxford, he had begun to find some difficulty in tying his shoelaces, he kept bumping into things, and a number of times he felt his legs give way from under him. Without a drink passing his lips, he would, on occasion, find his speech slurring as though he were intoxicated. Not wanting to admit to himself that something was wrong, he said nothing and tried to get on with his life.

Upon arriving in Cambridge another problem arose. When he had applied to do a Ph.D. at the university, there were two possible areas of research open to him: elementary particles, the study of the very small; and cosmology, the study of the very large. As he has said himself:

I thought that elementary particles were less attractive, because, although they were finding lots of new particles, there was no proper theory of elementary particles. All they could do was arrange the particles in families, like in botany. In cosmology, on the other hand, there was a well-defined theory—Einstein's general theory of relativity.
¹

However, there was a snag. He had originally chosen to go to Cambridge University because at the time Oxford could not offer cosmological research and, most important,
he wanted to study under Fred Hoyle, who had a worldwide reputation as the most eminent scientist in the field. But instead of getting Hoyle, he was placed under the charge of one Dennis Sciama, of whom he had never heard. For a while this turn of events struck him as disastrous, but he came to realize that Sciama would be a far better supervisor because Hoyle was forever traveling abroad and could find little time to play the role of mentor. He soon discovered too that Dr. Sciama was himself a very fine scientist and a tremendously helpful and stimulating supervisor, always available for him to talk to.

Hawking's first term at Cambridge went rather badly. He found that he had not studied mathematics to a sufficiently high standard as an undergraduate and was soon struggling with the complex calculations involved in general relativity. He was still operating in his somewhat lazy work mode, and his research material was becoming increasingly demanding. For the second time in his life, he was beginning to flounder. Sciama (who died in 1999) recalled that although his student seemed exceptionally bright and ready to argue his point thoroughly and knowledgably, part of Hawking's problem was finding a suitable research problem to study.

The difficulty was that a research assignment had to be sufficiently taxing to meet the requirements of a Ph.D. course, and, because relativity research at that level was fairly new and unusual, the right sort of problem was not easy to find.

Sciama believed that at that time Hawking came close to losing his way and flunking the whole thing. This was a situation that persisted for at least the first year of his Ph.D. Things would begin to resolve themselves only through a complex
series of events initiated by changes already unfolding inside Hawking's own body.

When Stephen returned to St. Albans for the Christmas vacation at the end of 1962, the whole of southern England was covered in a thick blanket of snow. In his own mind, he must have known that something was wrong. The strange clumsiness he had been experiencing had occurred more frequently but had gone unobserved by anyone in Cambridge. Sciama remembered noticing early in the term that Hawking had a very slight speech impediment but had put it down to nothing more than that. However, when he arrived at his parents' home, because he had been away for a number of months, they instantly noticed that something was wrong. His father's immediate conclusion was that Stephen had contracted some strange bug while in the Middle East the previous summer—a logical conclusion for a doctor of tropical medicine. But they wanted to be sure. They took him to the family doctor, who referred him to a specialist.

On New Year's Eve, the Hawkings threw a party at 14 Hillside Road. It was, as might have been expected, a civilized affair with sherry and wine; close friends were invited, including school friends John McClenahan and Michael Church. The word passed around that Stephen was ill, the exact nature of the disease unknown, but something picked up in foreign climes was the general impression. Michael Church remembers that Stephen had difficulties pouring a glass of wine and that most of the liquid ended up on the tablecloth
rather than in the glass. Nothing was said, but there was an atmosphere of foreboding that evening.

A young woman named Jane Wilde, whom Stephen had previously known only vaguely, had also been invited to the party. A mutual friend formally introduced him to her during the course of the evening. Jane also lived in St. Albans and attended the local high school. As the dying hours of 1962 trickled away and 1963 began, the two of them began to talk and to get to know each other. She was in the upper sixth and had a place at Westfield College in London to begin studying modern languages the following autumn. Jane found the twenty-one-year-old Cambridge postgraduate a fascinating and slightly eccentric character and was immediately attracted to him. She recalls sensing an intellectual arrogance about him, but “there was something lost, he knew something was happening to him of which he wasn't in control.”
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From that night, their friendship blossomed.

He was due back in Cambridge to begin the Lent term later in January, but instead of resuming his work there he was taken into the hospital to undergo a series of investigatory tests. Hawking recalls the experience vividly:

They took a muscle sample from my arm, stuck electrodes into me, and injected some radio-opaque fluid into my spine, and watched it going up and down with X-rays, as they tilted the bed. After all that, they didn't tell me what I had, except that it was not multiple sclerosis, and that I was an atypical case. I gathered, however, that they expected it to continue to get worse, and that there was nothing they could do except give
me vitamins. I could see that they didn't expect them to have much effect. I didn't feel like asking for more details, because they were obviously bad.
³

The doctors advised him to return to Cambridge and his cosmological research, but that, of course, was easier said than done. Work was not going well, and now the ever-present possibility of imminent death hung over his every thought and action. He returned to Cambridge and awaited the results of the tests. A short time later, he was diagnosed as having a rare and incurable disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, also known in the United States as Lou Gehrig's disease after the Yankee baseball player who had died from the illness in 1941. In Britain it is usually called motor neuron disease.