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Stephen Hawking: driven by a cosmic force of will
Roger Highfield meets Prof Stephen Hawking, whose life and work is to be celebrated in a 70th birthday exhibition.
Roger Highfield is the Director of External Affairs at the National Museum of Science and Industry. He was the Editor of New Scientist between 2008 and 2011 and has written for The Daily Telegraph since 1986. He was born in Wales in 1958, raised in north London and became the first person to bounce a neutron off a bubble (made with heavy soap) during his DPhil in physical chemistry, conducted at Oxford University and the Institut Laue Langevin, Grenoble.
Stephen Hawking’s nurse offers me his hand to shake; it hangs limply as I take it. Even though he retains a youthful complexion, the devastating impact of the disease that has ravaged his body for almost 50 years is all too apparent. Yet I feel no pity – only awe.
It was in 1963, then a bright, ambitious, 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge, that Hawking was told that he had a type of motor neurone disease (today we know it as an atypical form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and was given about two years to live. His illness was degenerative: it would attack the nerves that controlled his muscles, affecting first his body, then eventually his mood, senses and thinking.
On Sunday, Hawking will celebrate his 70th birthday, and this week a conference will be held in his honour in Cambridge: the 27 invited speakers are world leaders in black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics. While his body was paralysed, Hawking used his mind to journey through the cosmos, glimpsing the origins of space and time. And that, indeed, is the story of his life: he is a man who has defied the laws of medicine in order to rewrite the laws of physics.
My visit to Professor Hawking a few days ago – alongside Ian Blatchford and Heather Mayfield, the director and deputy director of the Science Museum – was to thank him for his help with a new exhibition on his life and work to mark this milestone birthday. He was too tired for a full discussion: sustaining a conversation takes him an extraordinary amount of time and effort. But, I know, from previous visits and from the jokes he has shared with our curators during the preparation of the exhibition, that his waggish humour is clearly still in full flower.
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It was in 1963, then a bright, ambitious, 21-year-old PhD student at Cambridge, that Hawking was told that he had a type of motor neurone disease (today we know it as an atypical form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) and was given about two years to live. His illness was degenerative: it would attack the nerves that controlled his muscles, affecting first his body, then eventually his mood, senses and thinking.
On Sunday, Hawking will celebrate his 70th birthday, and this week a conference will be held in his honour in Cambridge: the 27 invited speakers are world leaders in black holes, cosmology and fundamental physics. While his body was paralysed, Hawking used his mind to journey through the cosmos, glimpsing the origins of space and time. And that, indeed, is the story of his life: he is a man who has defied the laws of medicine in order to rewrite the laws of physics.
My visit to Professor Hawking a few days ago – alongside Ian Blatchford and Heather Mayfield, the director and deputy director of the Science Museum – was to thank him for his help with a new exhibition on his life and work to mark this milestone birthday. He was too tired for a full discussion: sustaining a conversation takes him an extraordinary amount of time and effort. But, I know, from previous visits and from the jokes he has shared with our curators during the preparation of the exhibition, that his waggish humour is clearly still in full flower.
Read the rest
