Stephen Hawking – a true genius (8 Jan 1942 – 14 March 2018)

I would be very remiss if I didn’t write something about Stephen Hawking following his death yesterday, aged 76. He died on pi day, an Americanism because 14 March is 3.14 in American date nomenclature.

My local rag, The AGE, has given him a double spread, as well as front page, so did The Australian. They normally only do that for sporting heroes like Don Bradman. But Hawking is arguably the only household name in physics after Einstein. A man restricted to a wheelchair for most of his life, whom we all remember for his distinctive synthetic voice and witticisms that belied his condition as well as his stellar intellect.

I’ll only mention a few things as others will provide a lot more about his life and his achievements. It’s no small thing that he held the same academic position as Isaac Newton, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge. He jointly won the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics in 1988 with Roger Penrose. He and Penrose had philosophical differences but great mutual respect. Penrose even invited Hawking to provide a counter point of view in one of his books, The Large the Small and the Human Mind (a whole chapter, in fact, along with others).

Hawking radiation is the only thing that can escape from a black hole, and was given that eponymous title, after Hawking mathematically derived its existence by applying the laws of quantum mechanics (in 1974).

My favourite sound byte about Hawking is his postulation that in the beginning there was no time, which he can explain better than me in the video below. Along with James Hartle, he formulated that time was originally ‘imaginary’ and existed as a 4th spatial dimension. I like it because it infers that if the Universe was originally a quantum one (hence the ‘imaginary’ dimension) then time did not exist and it’s an emergent feature of the Universe rather than a prerequisite. Hawking called it the ‘no-boundary’ Universe. Cosmologist, John Barrow, called it ‘a radical theory… proposed by James Hartle and Stephen Hawking for aesthetic reasons’. Barrow quipped that ‘once upon a time there was no time’.



Postscript: I watched a documentary on Hawking, done in 2015, when the oscar-winning movie of his life came out, and they interviewed family members as well as people who worked with him. Kip Thorne, an astrophysicist, who famously won a bet with him (refer below), told of how Hawking manipulated complex equations in his head because he couldn’t write them on a board or on paper like the rest of us would. I remember hearing about that feat decades ago, and it occurred to me that in some respect he shared something with Beethoven. Beethoven composed some of the world’s most famous and uplifting music without ever actually hearing it played. And Stephen Hawking created some of the most significant equations in physics without ever writing them down.

Correction: Kip Thorne won the bet with Hawking, which was whether black holes exist (made in 1974). Whether information is lost or not (in a black hole) is also explained in the link (according to Hawking as not), though I'm not sure all cosmologists agree.