Travelling to Infinity (56 page)

The small, traffic-free island of Marstrand off the west coast of Sweden proved to be the most delightful and suitable place for a convalescent physicist to flex his intellectual muscles. While
Stephen and his comrades explored the universe by means of the trajectories of elementary particles, I relaxed, cherishing peace and solitude in the rocky coves and walking along the woodland
tracks where daffodils still bloomed in June and the sun shone late into the night. The freedom of those few days in Sweden was a rare luxury, but one which just occasionally came my way thanks to
the unexpectedly helpful intervention of Stephen’s mother after the death of his father in March 1986. Stephen’s father was not an easy patient in his final illness; the frustration of
immobility was too burdensome for one who in earlier years had thought little of driving single-handed across Africa to enlist for service at the beginning of the Second World War, and who
habitually in his late seventies would spend whole weeks camping and walking in the Welsh mountains. His funeral marked a sad end to a distinguished but inadequately recognized career in tropical
medicine. I suspected that I was not the only person whose feelings towards him were decidedly ambivalent. I admired him and respected him, for he could be sensitive and considerate, even
appreciative, but he could also be cold, harsh and distant.

After his death, Isobel’s formerly stringent inflexibility appeared to mellow as she showed signs of greater compassion. She seemed anxious to share the stresses of our family life in a
new way and became popular with the children for her coolly sardonic sense of humour and for her apparently easygoing nature, which made few demands of them. She also showed a surprising and
benevolent tolerance of my relationship with Jonathan, as if she had finally come to realize that he was not intent on destroying the family but was genuinely supportive of us all, including
Stephen. I was grateful for her help and grateful for her understanding, especially when she offered to keep house so that we could resume our camping holidays on the Continent. If I could reliably
look forward to a couple of weeks’ summer holiday away from the strains of a half-life in a house where I was on duty in every capacity for seven days a week for a minimum of forty-nine weeks
a year, juggling all my roles, trying to be all things to all the inhabitants, I felt that I could summon the strength to continue, however onerous those duties might be. At the end of the allotted
time, I returned without question to Stephen.

Having spread his phoenix wings in Sweden without mishap, Stephen was eager to use them again and again. In September, the travelling circus – which now included a young physics graduate
as Stephen’s personal assistant – set off for Paris for a conference at the Observatoire de Paris at Meudon, where Brandon Carter worked. I was delighted to be able to spend time with
Lucette, bringing her up-to-date on the events of the past year, and there I also discovered a new role for myself – as chauffeur and interpreter for the party. At least the nurses could
hear, if not see, that I was good for something.

Only a month later we found ourselves again in Rome, where Stephen was to be admitted by the Pope to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, despite the heresies he was still preaching about the
universe having neither a beginning nor an end. Tim came too, as did the retinue of nurses and the young personal assistant whose responsibility it was to attend to the workings of the computer and
the mechanics of Stephen’s lectures. We tried to choose nurses whom we knew to be Catholic and who would appreciate the significance of the occasion. We were lucky in that two of the most
reliable and pleasant nurses on the rota, Pam and Theresa, were both Catholic and were overjoyed to be invited. We needed three nurses however, and not all were as keen as Pam and Theresa. It was
only at the last minute that Elaine Mason agreed to come with us: she did so only on the understanding that she would not have to shake hands with the Pope, as such a gesture would be against her
principles.

The second visit to Rome was more formal than the first in 1981. The weather was better, and so were the provisions made for us: we stayed in a much more comfortable hotel, closer to the
Vatican, and special tours of the art treasures of the Vatican were put on for wives and children while the scientists conferred in the Renaissance headquarters of the Academy. The climax of the
visit was an audience with Pope John Paul II, to which all members of Stephen’s party were admitted. With his hand gently resting on Tim’s head, the Pope talked quietly to Stephen and
me, pressing our hands and giving us his blessing. He then shook hands with the others, none of whom resisted. I was moved by the genuine warmth of his personality, the softness of his big hands
and the holiness of the light in his bright blue eyes. I had no religious prejudices, and had come to Rome with an open heart and mind. The Pope touched my heart and my mind, for – politics
and dogma apart – I sensed that he sincerely cared about the people he met and kept them in his prayers.

Encouraged by the success of these tentative trips abroad within Europe, Stephen’s aspirations knew no bounds. That December he soared away to the usual pre-Christmas scientific conference
in Chicago to reclaim his place on the international circuit. These days he travelled with all the ceremonial due to an Arab sheikh, surrounded by hordes of minions, nurses, students, the personal
assistant and the occasional colleague. He was attended by so much luggage that the chassis of the limousines that came to whisk him away to the airport often had difficulty in clearing the ground
as they left the driveway. The airlines had learnt to treat Stephen with respect, as a valued customer rather than as an inconvenience, and accorded him the sort of deference and assistance which,
had it come twenty years earlier when I was struggling to look after Stephen and a tiny baby, might have spared me much stress. Nowadays, ironically, my presence was almost superfluous on the
international travels. Alone among so many people, I often took Tim along for companionship, just as Robert had been my small companion in days gone by. Tim fulfilled this role admirably. He loved
air travel and, as the plane was gathering speed for take-off – my worst moment – he would gasp, “Faster! faster!” dispelling my lingering fears with his contagious
excitement. There was much that I could teach him and interest him in on these travels, not least a grounding in the Romance languages. In Spain, with patience and a total lack of competitiveness,
he taught me to play chess, something his father had never succeeded in doing.

Although eighteen months previously Stephen’s chances of survival had been dismissed as negligible, he had confounded the pessimists yet again: he had survived and was
back in the forefront of scientific research, theorizing on abstruse suppositions about imaginary particles travelling in imaginary time in a looking-glass universe which did not exist except in
the minds of the theorists. His phenomenal resurrection and the consequent transformation of his prospects had galvanized him into even more intense industry. He was travelling again, terrestrially
and universally, whenever and wherever he chose. Above all, just over a year since his first painstaking attempts to come to grips with the workings of the computer and his cautious return to the
Department, he had completed the second draft of his book and was searching for a title. His state of health continued to be extremely precarious, the subject of perpetual anxiety, but with all the
aids of modern medicine and twenty-four hour nursing care at his disposal, he virtually carried his own mini-hospital with him wherever he went. The nurses had learnt emergency techniques for
changing the tracheotomy tube, and Stephen himself had taken charge of his medication as he reckoned, rightly, that he knew more about his case than any doctor.

Another nurse – tall, aristocratic Amarjit Chohan from the Punjab – had joined the rota. By night she worked in the operating theatres at Addenbrooke’s, and by day (and in her
free time) she came to look after Stephen. In lonely exile from her own home, the victim of thinly veiled racism, she adopted us with a passionate intensity which soon began to upset the other
nurses. Stephen was flattered to find himself the contested prize in the battles which the more volatile, less stable of his attendants fought for his favours, and regarded their squabbles with
bemused complicity. In Spain, Tim and I were astounded to watch while one of the nurses flirted unashamedly with a student and then actually resorted to fisticuffs with another nurse over some
petty argument. Like distant thunder, rivalry between assertive personalities, each insisting on the superiority of her own method of care, rumbled menacingly. It was yet an additional wearisome
problem at home and a source of embarrassment in public abroad.

The big event of 1987 which, among the imaginary trajectories and illusory universes, was exercising Stephen and all those caught up in his orbit was the celebration of the tercentenary of the
publication of Newton’s
Principia Mathematica
with an international conference to be held in Cambridge. Stephen was firmly established at the centre of this event, since the
Newtonian tradition of leading cosmological research in Cambridge was consigned to his care as Lucasian Professor, and his work was the logical extension of Newtonian physics modified by the
twentieth-century influence of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Isaac Newton was born in 1642, the year of Galileo’s death and three hundred years before Stephen’s birth. Although his education as a schoolboy in Grantham and as a
“sizar” or servant-student in Trinity College was conservative, his major work
Principia Mathematica
was directly influenced by the mechanical and mathematical principles
formulated by René Descartes, the great seventeenth-century French philosopher. In Cambridge in the 1660s Descartes’ theories provoked “such a stir, some railing at him and
forbidding the reading of him as if he had impugned the very Gospel. And yet there was a general inclination, especially of the brisk part of the University to use him”. Newton took
Descartes’ principles home with him to Woolsthorpe Manor just after his graduation at the outbreak of the Plague. It was during that extraordinary period of creativity at Woolsthorpe Manor
that Newton at the age of twenty-three developed his three major discoveries: the calculus, the universal theory of gravitation and the theory of the nature of light.

Newton may have been “brisk” in adopting Descartes’ theories, but he was not at all brisk about publishing the results to which those theories had led him.
Principia
Mathematica
was finally published in 1687 at the insistence of Samuel Pepys, the President of the Royal Society, and Edmond Halley, the young astronomer. In his
magnum opus,
Newton
not only proposed the Law of Universal Gravitation, predicting the elliptical movement of the planets around the sun, but also developed the complicated mathematics of such motions. It is in
Principia Mathematica
that mathematics is harnessed to the service of physics and is rigorously applied to the visible universe.
Opticks
, Newton’s other great work, also
developed in the Plague years but not published until 1704, described light as a spectrum of colours which in combination formed white light, but which could be split into seven component bands.
Newton set up a prism in the path of a sunbeam and watched as the white light entering the prism split into the colours of the rainbow, producing not the rounded image of the sun on the opposite
wall, but an oblong image, where the seven colours from blue to red separated and fanned out “according to their degrees of refrangibility”. If
Principia Mathematica
was
inspired by the fall of an apple in the garden of Woolsthorpe Manor, the inspiration for
Opticks
was commercial – the improvement of the glass in the telescope, the instrument which
Galileo had first turned on the heavens in the winter of 1609. Although Newton would have described himself as a natural philosopher, one might designate him the first great modern mathematician
and physicist.

The product of an unhappy childhood, Newton could be dictatorial and not a little devious. He earned a reputation for vindictiveness in his treatment of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz,
who claimed to have discovered the calculus first. Newton’s discovery of the calculus, or fluxions as he called them, was prompted by his need in the mid-1660s for a general method of
mathematical calculation, essential for dealing with the dynamics of planetary motion. It was put to immediate use in his theory of gravitation, but typically he failed to publish his results and
was then incensed when Leibniz published his independent findings in 1676. There was nevertheless a humbler aspect of this embittered genius which appealed to me. When writing of his role in
science, he speculated about his own importance, unsure of the significance of his discoveries: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a
boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.
“Collecting pebbles on the beach” was the very image Stephen had used in 1965 to pour scorn on medieval studies.

Newton left no stone unturned on his particular beach. Although in the opinion of contemporaries he was said to be tone-deaf, he had in 1667 produced a theory of music.
Of Musick
was a
fairly unremarkable treatise containing nothing new; in it he considered questions of tuning the scale and compared in logarithmic terms the just and equal temperaments. He also used music to draw
synaesthetic analogies between the seven notes of the diatonic scale and the seven bands of colour in the spectrum, basing those analogies on the breadth of the colour bands and the seven string
lengths required to produce a scale.