Chapter 1Galileo's Anniversary

Foreword

I have spent my working life writing about American women of letters. Joan Didion, Susan Sontag: women who made sentences, who were made into images, and who spent their late decades negotiating the difference. That was my beat, and I understood its borders. My subjects wrote in English prose; they lived in New York and Los Angeles; they were photographed in sunglasses and were misread by the culture in ways I felt equipped to correct. So when I told people I was writing a book about Stephen Hawking — an Englishman, a physicist, a man — the response was usually a polite pause, and then the question I had already asked myself. What was he doing on my desk?

The honest answer is that he was the purest case of the thing I had been writing about all along. My subject was never really literature. My subject was what happens to a mind when the culture converts it into an image, and what the person inside the image does about it. Didion had the sunglasses and the cigarette. Sontag had the streak of white hair. Hawking had the wheelchair and the synthesised voice, and the conversion in his case was more total than in any life I had ever examined: a man whose body had been progressively taken from him for fifty-five years, and whose likeness became, in exchange, the most recognisable scientific image of the twentieth century. He was also, it is worth saying plainly, one of the bestselling authors of his era. He wrote a book that sold in the tens of millions. He was, by the only measures my earlier subjects would have recognised, a colleague of theirs. The culture simply filed him under a different heading.

I expected to write a book about celebrity. I found myself, for long stretches, writing a book about a household. The record I worked from is the public one: the physics literature, which I taught myself to read slowly and with help; the published memoirs, his own reticent one and his first wife's generous and unsparing one; the press archive, which is enormous and largely wrong in small consistent ways; the record of the investigations and the denials of the difficult years; the obituaries, the tributes, the corrective biography that arrived to argue with the tributes. I conducted no original interviews and claim none. This is a book built from what the century left lying in plain sight, on the conviction that plain sight is where this particular man has been least carefully looked at.

What I did not expect was the women. The mother who bought a single astronomy book in a blacked-out Oxford the week before the birth. The wife who married a man with a two-year prognosis and carried the household for a quarter of a century. The nurse who became the second wife. The daughter who now administers the voice. I had thought I was leaving my beat, and I found it waiting for me inside his story: the women of letters were there all along, holding the arrangements together, writing the memoirs, doing the practical arithmetic of a life that the image never showed. The image was a man alone in a chair, thinking. The life was never that.

Why is he worth a book — another book, after the shelf of them? Because the inventory and the man have come apart, and the gap between them is now the most interesting thing about him. He proved theorems; he was proved right, once, seven years after his death, by a signal from two colliding black holes. He also left a marriage, chose badly and well, liked being famous, and declined for fifty-five years to be reduced to any single version of himself — the genius, the victim, the saint in the chair, the overrated brand. Every reduction fails. I have tried, in what follows, not to reduce him, which is harder than it sounds and is, I have come to think, the whole discipline of this work.

The reader should know that I came to this book a partisan of a different literature and a different question. I leave it convinced they were the same question. What does a person owe the image the world makes of them? He answered it differently from my other subjects, and more strangely, and — I will let the evidence argue this — perhaps more successfully than anyone else the century produced.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · Galileo's Anniversary

There was an arrangement, in the second year of the war, between the British and the Germans. It was never written down, never signed, never acknowledged in any chamber of state. But both sides, when their bombers crossed the Channel each night, observed it. Britain agreed not to bomb Heidelberg or Göttingen. Germany agreed not to bomb Oxford or Cambridge. Each side wished to preserve the ancient universities of the other; each thought it might one day need them. The agreement held for the duration of the war. As a result, in the winter of 1942, when London was being burnt nightly and the Hawking family lived in Highgate, north London, near a hospital that had been hit twice, Frank Hawking decided his pregnant wife should go to Oxford to have the baby.

Isobel Walker Hawking was twenty-six. She had been at Oxford in the 1930s (Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Somerville) at a time when very few women attended the university at all, and almost none from her background, which was Glasgow Scottish, a family that had once produced doctors and had since come down in the world. She had earned her way into Oxford by examination and stayed in scholarship hostels, eating cold suppers, walking the same colleges in winter coats too thin for English winters. She had liked Oxford. She had liked the bookshops, the river, the long shadows of the colleges. To return there, in January 1942, eight months pregnant, while bombs fell on the city she was leaving: that was, in its way, a homecoming.

Frank Hawking, her husband, was a research scientist of thirty-six, specialising in tropical medicine. Yorkshire farming family that had been bankrupted in the agricultural collapse of the 1880s; medical school by scholarship; an early career partly in East Africa, where he had studied parasitic infections in the field. He was a man of frugal habits, wide reading, narrow conversation. He had married Isobel in 1940. He had not been called up (his medical research was considered war work) and he stayed in London. She would go to Oxford alone for the birth.

She booked a room in a private hotel on the Banbury Road. She walked, in the last week before the birth, into the Blackwell's bookshop on Broad Street, where she had spent so much of her own undergraduate income, and bought a single book on astronomy. It was, she later said, an indulgence. She was uncertain why she chose astronomy. Perhaps it was the sky over Oxford that night, which was clearer than London. Perhaps it was the fact that, with the blackout, the stars were more visible than they had been in decades. The book went into her handbag.

Her son was born on the 8th of January 1942.

She noticed, even on the day of the birth, that the date was significant. The baby was born on the three hundredth anniversary of the death of Galileo Galilei. Galileo, at the time of his death in 1642, had been blind, under house arrest, and condemned by the Inquisition, his devoted daughter Maria Celeste already eight years dead. He had also written, before the Inquisition silenced him, the book that begins modern science. Isobel, an educated woman in a frightened Oxford in the second year of the war, with a baby and a book on astronomy, recognised the date. She mentioned it to the nurses. They did not know what she was talking about.

The boy was named Stephen William Hawking. He was a healthy baby, of average weight, with an ordinary cry. His mother held him through the night. The bombs fell on Coventry, and on Bristol, and on Manchester, but did not fall on Oxford. The agreement held.

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Frank Hawking came up to Oxford by train when he could. He was working at the National Institute for Medical Research at Hampstead, which by 1942 had been partially evacuated to a country house outside Watford. He was studying parasitic infections and the diseases they transmitted; mosquitoes and leishmaniasis and the sleeping sickness of African cattle. He was the kind of man who, when his son was old enough to walk, would take him to the laboratory at Mill Hill and stand him in front of the insect cages with the tropically-infected mosquitoes inside, telling him that each of those insects carried a parasite that could kill a human being. The boy looked. He was three. He was not afraid. He was already, his father later thought, the kind of child who was more interested than frightened.

The Hawking parents had been a strange match. Frank was the older brother in a Yorkshire family that had managed, in the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, to lose every farm and small business it possessed. His grandfather had died bankrupt; his father had been a moderately successful farmer but the family had no land of its own. Frank, the eldest, had earned his way into medicine by examination: first to the local grammar school, then to Oxford, then to research medicine. He believed, with the conviction of a man whose family had been almost destroyed by economic forces it had not understood, in scholarships and books and the instrument of the educated mind. He believed his children should have an Oxford or Cambridge education at any cost.

Isobel was Glasgow and complicated. Her family, which had once produced doctors, had come down in the world in her father's generation; the household of her childhood had been a quiet long misery of money problems and thwarted expectation. Her own examined entry to Oxford in the 1930s had been, like Frank's, the instrument of an escape. She read PPE; she read everything else. She was politically the more left of the two; she was a member of the Liberal Party, then of the Labour Party; she would later remain so. She was secretarial, by profession, at a medical research institute when she met Frank. They married in 1940. They were intellectually serious, mutually loving, and physically frugal in a way that the wartime austerity confirmed and the post-war prosperity never managed to dislodge.

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The London house, after the boy was old enough to be brought home, was in Highgate. The bombs continued. Stephen had, perhaps, no specific memory of the war. His earliest clear memory, he later wrote, was of being in a department store in London (Selfridge's, possibly, on Oxford Street) and being separated from his mother in the toy department. He must have been three or four. He cried for a long time. A woman with a kindly face eventually took him to find Isobel. He remembered the relief and the woman's hands. He did not remember being scared.

The household had, even in his earliest memories, the character that visitors would later remark on for the rest of his parents' lives. The Hawkings were eccentric. They were not eccentric in any one particular way; they were eccentric across a wide range of small daily customs that, taken together, distinguished them from every other family on their street. They drove, as the family motor car, a converted London taxicab. Frank had bought it cheap after the war and adapted it with a wooden interior. The cab seated five and was painted black. It looked, to neighbours, like an undertaker's vehicle. The Hawkings drove it to Sunday outings and to school events. They drove it on long summer holidays.

The summer holiday, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was always to the same place: a stretch of the Dorset coast near Osmington Mills, west of Weymouth, where the family had a painted gypsy caravan that they kept on a friend's land. The caravan had once belonged to a Romany family. It was small, painted in green and red, with a little chimney. The family (Frank and Isobel and Stephen and the two younger sisters who had now arrived, Mary in 1943 and Philippa in 1947) would drive down in the converted cab, set up the caravan, and stay for two or three weeks. Frank would walk on the beach with a book under his arm. Isobel would cook on a paraffin stove. The children would run on the cliffs.

At meals, in St Albans and on the Dorset coast both, the family ate with books open at the table. Each member of the family would have a book in front of them. They would eat. They would read. They would not converse during the meal. This was, Stephen later thought, not unfriendliness; it was the family's particular habit of intellectual companionship. Friends who came to dinner were sometimes startled. Some of them refused to come back. Most found it endearing once they understood it.

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In 1950 the family moved to St Albans. Frank had been promoted to head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research, which had relocated to a new site at Mill Hill in north London, a forty-minute drive from St Albans through the lanes. The Hawkings bought a large, three-storey, late-Victorian house on a quiet street called Hillside Road. They paid less for it than for a smaller house in a more fashionable suburb because the house was in disrepair. They never repaired it. The wallpaper peeled. The plumbing was unreliable. The bookshelves filled every room: the kitchen, the bathroom, the staircase, the converted attic. Stephen later said he could not remember a wall in his childhood home that was not covered with books.

The family acquired, over the early St Albans years, a reputation for being clever and odd. The neighbours liked them. The neighbours did not always understand them. Stephen, was an awkward, slight, bespectacled boy with a high voice and a slight stammer, who at six was already devouring Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes in alphabetical order. He had been reading since he was two. He had taught himself to read mostly from his parents' books. He was, in the small social geometry of a 1950s English suburb, exactly the kind of child one would expect from a household that ate dinner reading.

The third sister, Mary, was a year and a half younger; the second sister, Philippa, was five years younger. The two girls were both bright but neither, in their parents' household, was treated quite the way Stephen was. Frank had decided, very early, that Stephen was the family's intellectual investment. The girls would be educated; they would be Oxford- or Cambridge-bound if they could earn it; but Stephen was the one for whom Frank harboured the great hopes. It was, in the social geometry of the 1950s, not unusual that the eldest son should be the family's particular project. It was, in the Hawking family, perhaps more pronounced than usual. Stephen was loved by both his parents; he was also the one toward whom, without ever quite saying so, his father directed the narrowest beam of expectation.

In 1956, when Stephen was fourteen, his parents adopted a fourth child, a boy named Edward, then about eighteen months old. Edward was the child of a friend of Isobel's who had run into difficulties; the Hawkings took him in and made him their own. Stephen later said Edward was the best thing that had ever happened to the family: a younger child, suddenly there, who broke up the cerebral solemnity of the household and made the family laugh. Edward grew up to be a man of considerable charm and not much academic discipline, the antithesis of his three older siblings. He would die, at the age of about forty-seven, in 2003. He was Stephen's brother in every sense that mattered.

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The Mill Hill years were the years of the laboratory visits. Stephen went, on Saturdays, with his father, to the National Institute for Medical Research. The institute was a low brick building, set in a campus, with a gatekeeper and a card-system entry. Frank had a key. They would walk down a corridor to the parasitology laboratory. The mosquito cages would be there: a row of perhaps a dozen wire-mesh enclosures, each containing several hundred mosquitoes, each colony infected with a different tropical parasite — one malaria, one yellow fever, one leishmaniasis, Frank would explain. The boy would press his face against the wire mesh. The mosquitoes would land on the inside. The boy would watch them.

Frank also kept, in his Mill Hill office, a set of photographs taken during his East African field years: photographs of patients with sleeping sickness in advanced stages, of villages with high mortality, of the funerals of children. He showed these to Stephen sometimes. He did not flinch from showing them. Frank Hawking's view of the world was fundamentally that there were diseases, and there was the work of identifying and stopping them, and that this work was the most serious thing a human being could do. Stephen would later say his father had given him two great gifts: the conviction that science was real work, and the understanding that the body was a fragile and terrifyingly vulnerable thing. Both gifts would matter.

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In the autumn of 1952, when Stephen was ten, he was sent to St Albans School. It was the local independent school: fee-paying, all-male, founded in the eighth century, attached in its long history to the cathedral. It was a respectable, mid-tier English public school. Frank had wanted Stephen to sit the scholarship examination for Westminster School in London, a school of the very first rank, with extraordinary academic standards and even more extraordinary fees. The plan was that Stephen would win the Westminster scholarship and go to Westminster, on a free place, at thirteen.

When Stephen was thirteen, in 1955, he came down with a heavy cold or flu the morning of the Westminster scholarship examination. He was too ill to take the train into London. The examination was missed. There would be no second chance that year, and the family could not afford to wait until the following year. The Westminster fees, without scholarship, were beyond what Frank's salary would cover.

Stephen stayed at St Albans. It was, in his later judgment and his parents', a piece of medical bad luck that was also a piece of intellectual good luck. At St Albans he was surrounded, for his sixth-form years, by a small group of friends who would matter to him for the rest of his life: a group of clever, irreverent, sceptical boys who would over the next four years build, together, a series of things that nobody had asked them to build. They built model aeroplanes. They built model boats. They had long arguments about Christianity and ESP. They produced fireworks of dubious safety. And, beginning in 1958, with the help of one of the school mathematics teachers, they built a computer.

The mathematics teacher was a man named Dikran Tahta, a Turkish-born Cambridge-educated young teacher who had arrived at St Albans in the late 1950s. Tahta was a teacher of a kind that English public schools sometimes produced and sometimes destroyed: a man whose first interest was the mathematics itself rather than the syllabus, a man who could see talent in a sixteen-year-old and bend his lesson plans to feed it. Tahta saw, in Stephen Hawking, a boy who was bored. Tahta also saw a boy whose mind worked, when it engaged, with extraordinary speed and unusual structure. Tahta did, for Stephen, the thing the best teachers do: he did not lecture; he asked questions. He let the boy work it out. He gave the boy harder problems than the syllabus required and watched what the boy did with them.

The computer-building project, which ran for several years and which Stephen would later credit as one of the formative experiences of his school life, used clock parts and an old telephone switchboard and many recycled components: relays, dials, wires. It was, by the standards of any subsequent computing technology, almost laughably primitive. It could perform a small set of logical operations; it could be programmed to do simple arithmetic. The boys gave it a name. It worked. It produced answers. It taught Stephen and his friends that computation was a physical thing: that arithmetic, when it ran on real wires, was no longer abstract; it was a small, specific machine doing a specific job.

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By the time Stephen was sixteen, Frank Hawking had begun to tell visitors that his eldest son would go to Cambridge. Cambridge was, in Frank's view, the better choice for a serious scientist. Frank himself had been at Oxford; he believed Oxford was the better place for medicine; but for physics or mathematics he believed Cambridge had the edge.

Stephen disagreed. He wanted Oxford. The reasons were not entirely scientific. Oxford was where his parents had met. Oxford was where he had been born. Oxford was, in his sixteen-year-old judgment, the place he wanted to be. Frank gave way. Stephen took the Oxford scholarship examination in March 1959, against his headmaster's advice (the headmaster thought Stephen was too young and should wait a year) and was awarded a place at University College, Oxford, his father's old college, on the strength of his physics paper alone.

He was seventeen.

He had, by his own later admission, no idea what he wanted to do with his life. He had wanted to study mathematics. Frank had told him there were no jobs for mathematicians and had pushed him toward physics, physics being, in Frank's view, mathematics applied to the actual structure of the world, which was the only kind of mathematics worth doing. Stephen acquiesced. He went up to Oxford in October 1959 to read physics. He was a thin, smiling, untidy seventeen-year-old, with thick-framed glasses, a high voice, and a slight stammer. He was three years younger than most of his year. He weighed, in October 1959, less than nine stone.

His mother, who took him to the train station at St Albans, watched him board the train for Oxford with a mother's mixed terror and pride. She had noticed, in the last year, that he had grown clumsy. He fell sometimes when he was running. He had been on the school football team but had been dropped because he could not, in his last term, manage the running. She had attributed it to his rapid growth; he was tall now, and his coordination had not caught up. She watched the train pull out. She did not yet know what was coming. Nobody did.

Behind, on the platform, the other St Albans mothers waved their sons goodbye and went home to ordinary suburban afternoons. The Hawkings, eccentric to the last, walked back to the converted London taxicab, drove home along the lanes, and ate dinner that night with the books open at table. The boy who was in the train was already in motion toward Oxford, and toward the woman he would marry, and toward the disease that would shape every subsequent year, and toward the equations that would change cosmology, and toward the wheelchair that would, in the end, be parked in front of cameras as the most recognisable scientific image of the twentieth century. None of that was visible from the platform. He was, on the train, only a thin clever boy who had outgrown the school football team. The night came on. The train ran south. He read, by the light of the carriage, a book.