Time came to a standstill for Professor Stephen William Hawking on March 14 at the age of 76. If alive, the legendary physicist and author, renowned for his path-breaking work on gravitational singularities, black holes, and also for his wicked sense of humour, would have rubbished the previous sentence, calling me an idiot and saying that time comes to a standstill only when travelling at the speed of light or at the event horizons of black holes — the monstrous space-time warps that he built his life’s work on.
The death of the scientist, some say, leaves a ‘black-hole sized’ void which is impossible to fill and social media has been overflowing with tributes from students, science enthusiasts and personalities from all walks of life. Such is the devotion inspired by the genius who explored the universe from his wheelchair, that tributes have been plentiful. “He was one of the bravest men I ever met — optimistic and caring, in spite of being immersed in a constant personal battle to survive. And all the way, although hampered by being able to communicate at the rate of only two words a minute, still managing to crack gentle jokes, and make incisive comments,” wrote Brian May, rockstar and astrophysicist, in an Instagram post remembering Professor Hawking.
A brief history
Born on January 8, 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of the great astronomer Galileo Galilei, in Oxford, to a middle-class family, Hawking was not academically brilliant, yet everyone saw the genius in him, which earned him the nickname ‘Einstein’. Despite the average grades, he landed a scholarship to study physics at the University College, Oxford. With a first-class honours degree in natural science, he joined the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009, the title once held by Isaac Newton.
For the young Hawking, there began the incredible journey into the heart of black holes, in search of fabled singularities and the beginning of the universe itself. Unfortunately, in 1963, at 21, he was diagnosed with the incurable, degenerative amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Doctors gave him less than 2 years time, yet he went on to become one of the greatest scientists in the next 55, most of which he has spent on his motorised wheelchair with an attached voice synthesiser for speech.
- God, the Universe and Everything Else is a 1988 documentary in which Arthur C Clarke, Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking discuss the Big Bang theory, god and extraterrestrial life. Apart from The Simpsons , Professor Hawking has also been in shows like The Big Bang Theory , Futurama and Star Trek.
- His robotic voice has been used in a cover of the famous band Monty Python’s ‘Galaxy’ song and another number ‘Keep Talking’ by rock band Pink Floyd.
- In 2016, Professor Hawking acted with Ant-Man star Paul Rudd in an educational short film ‘Anyone can quantum’, narrated by Keanu Reeves, in which Rudd challenges him to a game of quantum chess with the future of humanity at stake.
- In the 2004 BBC television film Hawking , Benedict Cumberbatch plays Hawking during his time as a postgraduate student at Cambridge. The Theory of Everything is a 2014 biopic of the professor. British actor Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar, BAFTA and Golden Globe for best actor for his performance as Hawking.
An affair with the Universe
The origin of the Universe was, and still remains, perhaps the most important question of all time. The work of a cosmologist is to try and find the answer to that. “Being a speck of dust in this cosmos, observing the universe, is like seeing the world through the eye of a needle. Professor Hawking saw through it, into exotic objects, where the world as we know it would no longer exist,” says Eldho Midhun Babu, a space science masters student at University College Dublin.
Hawking’s work with mathematician Roger Penrose using Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity resulted in the finding that space and time would have a beginning in a singularity which then expanded into a big bang. This also revealed that there is a need to combine Einstein’s theory with the Quantum theory. This marriage of two of the biggest theoretical frameworks of physics led Hawking to come up with concepts such as Hawking radiation and Imaginary time. “Hawking radiation, the constant leakage of particles from a black hole, thereby making it lighter and at one point resulting in a huge explosion, causing its death, is, for me, the single most important discovery of Stephen Hawking. The idea that some things can escape the presumably inescapable black holes was a revelation,” says Karthik Rajeev, a researcher of Cosmology at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA), Pune.
Charlie Chaplin once famously quipped that people love Albert Einstein even when they don’t understand him. It is the same with Hawking. But unlike Einstein, he not only unlocked the secrets of the Universe, but also offered a vision of what he saw to the layman through his popular science talks, lectures and books, especially the 1988 magnum opus, A Brief History of Time . Anand Narayanan, an associate professor of Astrophysics at Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology (IIST), believes the best-seller has done more to popularise science than any other book. “Before that book, how many of us knew about relativity, black holes, entropy or arrow of time? He brought these esoteric words into our reading rooms in the most engaging manner. Suddenly everyone was talking about it; Hawking made the physical universe accessible to the common folk,” he says.
- After completely losing his speech capability after a tracheotomy in 1985, he had to rely on a speech synthesiser to communicate. He had to depend on a hand-held clicker to select words and form sentences. But in 1997, Intel stepped in to upgrade the system with their Assistive Context-Aware Toolkit (ACAT), an open source interface, that helps control the screen using the operator’s cheek movement. In Hawking’s case the infrared sensor was mounted on his spectacles, which detected his face.
Comic cosmologist
A pop-culture icon, he has appeared in several TV shows and documentaries. Forget the talks and the books, the witty cosmologist has even been featured in The Simpsons . In the episodes he was part of, he is portrayed as the smartest man in the world on a motorised wheelchair, which has concealed boxing gloves to punch people, and helicopter blades for flying. Being a big fan of the show, he used to drop in for the rehearsals, and has even said in an interview that as many people know him through the series as they do through his science.
In this handout photo provided by Zero Gravity Corp., astrophysicist Stephen Hawking floats on a zero-gravity jet, Thursday, April 26, 2007. The modified jet carrying Hawking, a handful of his physicians and nurses, and dozens of others first flew up to 24,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean off Florida. Nurses lifted Hawking and carried him to the front of the jet, where they placed him on his back atop a special foam pillow. The plane made a total of eight parabolic dips, including two during which Hawking made two weightless flips like "a gold-medal gymnast," said Peter Diamandis, chairman of Zero Gravity Corp., the company that owns the jet. (AP Photo/Zero Gravity Corp.) ** NO SALES ** MANDATORY CREDIT **
In one of his most famous recent TV appearances, Professor Hawking was interviewed in 2014 by comedian and HBO’s Last Week Tonight host John Oliver. Several important topics were discussed, including artificial intelligence, imaginary time and the ‘pressing’ question of whether it is possible for a parallel universe to exist in which Oliver is smarter than the legendary scientist. The professor answered with a quirky smile, “Yes. And also a universe where you are funny.”
He passed away on Pi day, the birthday of Albert Einstein, who also died at the age of 76. But one day we may find proof of multiple universes and it is possible that there’s a universe in which Professor Hawking is alive, well and still working on his ambitious Theory of Everything, which would be able to explain all that is happening in the Universe.
