At twenty-one, doctors told him he had about two years to live. He lived fifty-five more years, and rewrote what science knows about black holes — most of it without being able to walk or speak. His name was Stephen Hawking. He was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England, where his parents had moved to escape the London bombing. He liked to note that he was born exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. At Oxford he studied physics and took a first-class degree, then moved to Cambridge in 1962 to study cosmology — how the universe itself began. This is the story of the man of the century.
The Diagnosis That Focused Him
In 1963, aged twenty-one, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a motor neurone disease that slowly takes away movement. Doctors gave him about two years. By his own account, the death sentence ended his boredom: if his time was short, he would spend it on the biggest questions there are. He finished his doctorate in 1966, and with Roger Penrose he developed the singularity theorems, showing that under Einstein's theory, space and time must break down at certain points — powerful support for the idea that the universe began in a Big Bang.
Black Holes Are Not Black
Then, in 1974, he made the discovery that carries his name. Black holes were supposed to be perfectly black, places where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. Hawking combined quantum mechanics with relativity and showed they are not black at all. At the edge of a black hole, pairs of particles appear; one falls in, and the other escapes as a faint glow. That glow is Hawking radiation, a theoretical prediction that linked gravity, quantum theory and heat in a single result. In 1979 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair once held by Isaac Newton.
The Voice and the Book
In 1985, pneumonia nearly killed him. A tracheotomy saved his life, but it took his natural speech. From then on he communicated through a wheelchair-mounted speech synthesiser, choosing words letter by letter, later with a sensor in his cheek. He kept its American accent for the rest of his life, refusing every upgrade — it had become his voice. In 1988 he published A Brief History of Time, a book that put the universe on ordinary coffee tables. It stayed on the bestseller list for a record 237 weeks and sold over ten million copies. In 2007, he floated weightless on a zero-gravity flight.
Pi Day
Stephen Hawking died on 14 March 2018 in Cambridge. That date is Pi Day, and it is also Albert Einstein's birthday. His final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, was published after his death, still asking how the universe works, and whether humanity will survive to understand it. His body gave him the smallest possible stage — a chair, a screen, and a borrowed voice. And from that stage, he described the whole universe.
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