Stephen Hawking

• 1. Introduction

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  Stephen Hawking spent his final years communicating at roughly one word per minute, twitching a single cheek muscle to select letters from a screen. Yet from that near-total stillness he produced papers on black hole entropy, co-developed a theory of top-down cosmology, and gave public lectures that drew crowds around the world. He was born on the 8th of January 1942, in Oxford, and died on the 14th of March 2018, at the age of 76, having outlived his original diagnosis by more than fifty years. The questions that shaped his life were enormous: How did the universe begin? Do black holes destroy information forever? Is time travel possible? What came before the Big Bang? Those questions will guide everything that follows.

• 2. A Family of Strivers

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  Frank and Isobel Hawking met at Oxford, where Frank studied medicine and Isobel read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, despite the financial constraints left by a great-grandfather who had gone bankrupt buying farm land and a great-grandmother who had saved the family by running a school from their home. Frank became a medical researcher specialising in tropical diseases; Isobel worked as a secretary at a medical research institute. Hawking later described his father as his direct model: "Because he was a scientific researcher, I felt that scientific research was the natural thing to do when one grew up." He added that medicine and biology seemed too inexact, and that he wanted something more fundamental, which he found in physics.

  The family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire, in 1950, when Frank became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. Neighbours considered them highly intelligent and somewhat eccentric. Meals were often silent, each person reading a separate book. They lived frugally in a large, cluttered house and got around in a converted London taxicab. At school, Hawking was nicknamed Einstein but was not initially a standout student. His turn came when mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta inspired him to pursue the subject seriously. From 1958, Hawking and friends built a rudimentary computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard, and recycled components. By 1959, Hawking had assembled a record player from cheap spare parts, noting that his father, a practical Yorkshireman, approved of the economy of the project.

• 3. Oxford, Cambridge, and the Diagnosis

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  Hawking arrived at University College, Oxford, in October 1959 at the age of 17, and spent the first eighteen months bored and lonely, finding the academic work "ridiculously easy". His physics tutor Robert Berman later recalled that Hawking needed only to know something was possible and could then accomplish it without consulting how others had done it. Hawking's own estimate was that he studied about 1,000 hours across his entire three years at Oxford, roughly one hour a day. Sitting his final examinations on so little preparation, he chose to answer only theoretical physics questions and landed on the borderline between first- and second-class honours, requiring a viva.

  At that oral examination, Hawking told the panel: "If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First." Berman noted the examiners were intelligent enough to recognise they were speaking with someone far more capable than most of themselves. Hawking received the first-class degree and began graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in October 1962.

  In 1963, at age 21, doctors diagnosed him with an early-onset, slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease. They gave him two years to live. Hawking fell into a depression but returned to work with the encouragement of his supervisor Dennis William Sciama, one of the founders of modern cosmology. His illness, it turned out, progressed far more slowly than predicted. He later reflected: "Before I got motor neuron disease, I was bored with life. But the prospect of an early death made me realize life was really worth living."

• 4. Black Holes, Radiation, and the Shape of Time

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  Roger Penrose's theorem about singularities at the centres of black holes gave Hawking his first major direction. Working from Penrose's framework, Hawking applied the same logic to the entire universe and, during 1965, wrote his thesis arguing that the cosmos itself must have begun as a singularity. His essay "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time" shared the top prize at that year's Adams Prize alongside a paper by Penrose. In 1970, Hawking and Penrose together published a proof that if general relativity holds and the universe fits any of Alexander Friedmann's physical models, then it must have started as a singularity.

  A visit to Moscow changed the direction of his research. Yakov Zeldovich and Alexei Starobinsky showed that rotating black holes emit particles according to the uncertainty principle. Hawking set out to challenge their work and instead confirmed it, finding to his own annoyance that his calculations pointed to black holes radiating energy. In 1974, he formally claimed that black holes emit what is now called Hawking radiation, and that this process might continue until a black hole exhausts its energy and evaporates. Hawking radiation was controversial at first. By the late 1970s, following further published research, it was widely accepted as a major theoretical breakthrough. As of the twenty-first century, a search for Hawking radiation from actual astrophysical black holes continues; the law itself was validated in 2025 by analysis of the black hole merger GW250114.

  Hawking's collaboration with James M. Bardeen in 1973 produced the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing a deliberate analogy with thermodynamics. One of those laws touched on gravitational waves, first theorised by Oliver Heaviside in 1893 and not directly observed until 2015. The theoretical fabric Hawking wove in the 1970s ran decades ahead of the instruments needed to test it.

• 5. Paradoxes and Bets

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  Hawking had a habit of staking his scientific credibility on wagers. In 1974, he bet his friend Kip Thorne that the X-ray source Cygnus X-1 was not a black hole, framing the bet as an insurance policy in case black holes did not exist. He conceded the loss in 1990. In 1991, he bet Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech that no singularities could exist naked, unshielded by a horizon; he conceded that bet in 1997 after the argument turned out to be more complicated than he had initially allowed. The same year, Thorne and Hawking together wagered against Preskill on whether information falling into a black hole is permanently lost. In 2004, at a lecture in Dublin, Hawking conceded this bet too, describing his own controversial solution involving black holes that may have more than one topology. In January 2014, he called his original position on information loss his "biggest blunder".

  Hawking also bet that the Higgs boson would never be found. Peter Higgs had proposed the particle in 1964 as part of his field theory, and the two men clashed publicly in 2002 and again in 2008. Higgs complained that Hawking's celebrity gave him credibility others did not have. The particle was discovered in July 2012 at CERN following construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Hawking immediately conceded and said Higgs deserved the Nobel Prize for Physics, which Higgs received in 2013.

  In June 2009, Hawking tested his 1992 conjecture that travel into the past is effectively impossible by holding a party with food and drinks, publicising it only after it had ended so that only time travellers would know to attend. Nobody came.

• 6. A Brief History and Its Aftermath

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  In 1982, Hawking decided to write a popular book about the universe to finance his children's education and household expenses. Rather than approach an academic press, he signed with Bantam Books, a mass-market publisher, and received a large advance. A first draft was completed in 1984. His editor at Bantam, Peter Guzzardi, pushed him repeatedly to explain ideas in plain language, a process that required many revisions from an increasingly irritated Hawking.

  A Brief History of Time was published in April 1988 in the United States and in June in the United Kingdom. It rose quickly to the top of best-seller lists in both countries, appeared on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks, and by 2009 had sold an estimated nine million copies. A Newsweek cover and a television special both described him as "Master of the Universe". The book was translated into many languages. Hawking travelled extensively to promote his work, enjoyed late-night parties, and found it difficult to refuse invitations, which left him limited time for research and his graduate students. Some colleagues believed the attention Hawking received was inflated by public interest in his disability.

  Hawking followed the book with Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays in 1993 and The Universe in a Nutshell in 2001. In 2007, he and his daughter Lucy published George's Secret Key to the Universe, a children's book explaining theoretical physics through characters modelled on the Hawking family; it generated sequels in 2009, 2011, 2014, and 2016. His final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, appeared in October 2018, after his death.

• 7. The Body and the Voice

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  Hawking's physical decline was slow enough that he spent years resisting its implications. During his final year at Oxford he stumbled on stairs and had difficulty rowing. By the late 1960s he was using crutches and could no longer lecture regularly. As he lost the ability to write, he trained himself to visualise equations geometrically; Werner Israel compared this feat to Mozart composing a full symphony entirely in his head. Hawking required considerable persuasion before accepting a wheelchair at the end of the 1960s and then became notorious for the wildness of his driving.

  In mid-1985, during a visit to CERN, Hawking contracted pneumonia so severe that doctors asked Jane whether life support should be withdrawn. She refused. The consequence was a tracheotomy that removed what remained of his speech. In 1986, Walter Woltosz, CEO of Words Plus, provided a program called the Equalizer, which allowed Hawking to select phrases, words, or letters from a bank of roughly 2,500-3,000 options by pressing a switch. David Mason, a computer engineer and the husband of nurse Elaine Mason, adapted a small computer and attached it to Hawking's wheelchair. Hawking could initially produce up to fifteen words per minute. He commented: "I can communicate better now than before I lost my voice."

  The voice the synthesiser produced had an American accent and is no longer manufactured. Hawking retained it for the rest of his life, saying he had come to identify with it. By 2005, he had lost the use of his hand and switched to controlling the device with movements of his cheek muscles, producing roughly one word per minute. His team at Intel worked with the London startup SwiftKey to build an adaptive word predictor trained on large amounts of Hawking's own writing. The earliest surviving motorised wheelchair he used was sold at Christie's in November 2018 for £296,750; proceeds from the auction of his doctoral thesis and other items, which together fetched about £1.8 million, went to the Motor Neurone Disease Association, the Stephen Hawking Foundation, and his estate.

• 8. Legacy in Science and Culture

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  Hawking held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009, retiring when university policy required it at age 67. The post is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious academic positions in the world; Isaac Newton once held it. Hawking supervised 39 successful PhD students across his career.

  His ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey on the 15th of June 2018 in the Abbey's nave, between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. His memorial stone carries the equation describing the temperature of Hawking radiation emitted by black holes, an epitaph he chose at least fifteen years before his death. In June 2018, a speech of his, set to music by the Greek composer Vangelis, was beamed into space from a European Space Agency dish in Spain toward the nearest black hole, 1A 0620-00.

  In 1993, Hawking's synthesiser voice was recorded for use in the Pink Floyd song "Keep Talking". He played a holographic version of himself in Star Trek: The Next Generation that same year, guest-starred in Futurama and The Big Bang Theory, and appeared as the voice of The Book Mark II on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series in 2018. Eddie Redmayne won an Academy Award portraying him in The Theory of Everything in 2014. The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication, established in 2016, is awarded annually to arts figures who help build public awareness of science; the first recipients, chosen by Hawking himself, were composer Hans Zimmer, physicist Jim Al-Khalili, and the documentary film Particle Fever. His final paper, A smooth exit from eternal inflation?, was published posthumously in the Journal of High Energy Physics on the 27th of April 2018.