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Stephen Hawking
By James C. and Rachel D.

Early Days

      Stephen Hawking was born on January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England. His parents were Frank and Isobel Hawking. The Hawkings were very clever and eccentric. Frank was a medical research scientist and Isobel was a secretary. Stephen was introduced to Astronomy as a young boy by his father. Stephen's first school was a private school named St. Albans School. He was an awkward and messy child upon entering the school. He would talk in fits and bursts much like his father would. His interest in science grew as school passed. He loved to find out how things work. He decided to study physics and mathematics in college and entered Oxford University in October of 1959 at the age of 17. Stephen found in hard to accommodate to college life. He had no friends and was bored with all of his work. With his high understanding of math and physics, he had no trouble doing any problems. Stephen's advisor, Robert Berman, once said, "undergraduate physics is no challenge for him." Upon his second year at Oxford, his boredom finally receded when he discovered the passion of rowing. Stephen became a coxswain, the steersman of a row boat, and became part of a socially acceptable crowd. Hawking earned his first-class degree from Oxford and was accepted into Cambridge. Upon entering Cambridge, he decided to study Cosmology, the study of the nature and origin of the universe. Hawking had bad study habits at Oxford and these bad habits made him suffer at Cambridge. He had not studied math well enough and began to have problems with equations. General relativity involves complex equations which is taught in cosmology. 

Theories and Contributions to Physics

      Stephen Hawking was having trouble finding a thesis for his Ph.D. He finally stumbled across a research problem from studying Roger Penrose's work on collapsing stars that form singularities. Singularities form when a star collapses in on itself and all of its matter is contained in a single point of infinite density. Hawking imagined the Universe as starting out as a singularity. This became his dissertation topic at Cambridge. Hawking worked hard for the first time in his life on this problem. Stephen created the singularity theorem for the origin on the universe and was awarded his Ph.D. at the age of 23. After receiving his doctorate, Stephen began to study with Penrose. This research led him to the study of black holes, and he suggested that after the big bang "mini" black holes were formed. According to Hawking, the surface area of a black hole can increase but cannot decrease, and that one black hole cannot divide into two. He mathematically proved that black holes thermally create and emit subatomic particules until they exhaust their energy and explode. Because of this, gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics were mathematically linked for the first time. 

Fame

      The publication and success of A Brief History of Time made Stephen one of the most famous scientists of his time. This book was intended for the general public but was still quite challenging for the average person to understand. The book brought insight to the field of cosmology. After the excitement of Stephen's new book, he was being interviewed by newspapers, magazines, and TV shows. He was asked to hold lectures at many organizations and happily accepted all of them. He received many awards because of his book. Queen Elizabeth II made Hawking a companion of honour. He was also made an honorary doctor of science by Cambridge University. Hawking has his own painting of himself in the National Portrait Gallery in London. After the publication of A Brief History of Time, a documentary on Hawking and his concepts was created. He was now more popular than ever and could be considered a celebrity.

Excerpt from A Brief History of Time:

      A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"
      Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of turtles rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better?

Quotes

  • "Someone told me that each equation I included in my book would halve the sales. I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation, E = MC squared. I hope that this will not scare off half of my potential readers."

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  • "God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen."

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  • "Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" 
  • "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."

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  • "Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry."

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  • "Disorder increases with time because we measure time in the direction in which disorder increases."

Links

Sources:

1. "Stephen Hawking's Universe". Cosmological Stars. Public Broadcasting Service. 6 Nov. 2003.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/cosmostar/html/hawking.html.

 2. Evans, J.C. "Stephen William Hawking". Physics and Astronomy Department, George Mason University. 6 Nov. 2003. 
http://www.physics.gmu.edu/classinfo/astr103/CourseNotes/ECText/Bios/hawking.htm. 

3. "Stephen Hawking". Wikipedia Encyclopedia. 6 Nov. 2003. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking.

 4. J. J. O'Connor and E F Robertson. "Stephen William Hawking." December 1997. 
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Hawking.html. 

5. Donaldson, Nick. "The Stephen Hawking Pages."
http://www.psyclops.com/hawking/

 6. McDaniel, Melissa. Stephen Hawking: Revolutionary Physicist. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2001.

 7. Hawking, Stephen. A Brief History of TIme. New York: Batnam Books, 1988.