Soaring Across Space and Time

Most of the day he sits huddled in a wheelchair in his small, cluttered office at England's Cambridge University. At his side is a mechanical page turner that allows him to read without calling for assistance. Stephen Hawking has been confined to a wheelchair for eight years, the victim of a type of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a rare, wasting disease of the nervous system and muscles. He cannot raise his head without great effort. He speaks only in a slurred monotone comprehensible to just a few intimates. Yet, at age 36, in spite of his heart-rending handicaps, Hawking is widely regarded as one of the premier scientific theorists of the 20th century, perhaps an equal of Einstein. His special province: the physics of black holes.

In the late 1960s, as a research fellow at Cambridge, he and a colleague, Roger Penrose, showed more convincingly than ever before that if Einsteinian general relativity is correct, gravitational collapse will result in "singularities" that are totally hidden inside black holes. But Hawking did not stop there. Following up the work of John Wheeler's student, Jacob Bekenstein, he pointed out that there are important mathematical analogies between the bizarre otherworld of black holes and the familiar physical rules of thermodynamics, notably the idea of entropy--which says, in effect, that the universe is running down like an unwinding clock.

After three years of prodigious calculations, he determined that some black holes must have been created during the birth of the universe, in the cataclysmic explosion called the Big Bang. These black holes, as opposed to those formed later by the collapse of stars, are minuscule; their event horizons are no larger than the circumference of a proton or other atomic particle. Subsequently, he found that they seemed to be radiating energy. That was such a startling break with the accepted concept of black holes that Hawking at first doubted his results. But no one has yet uncovered flaws in his elaborate mathematics. Indeed, many theorists believe that with this work Hawking may well have qualified for the Nobel Prize by taking the first step toward a goal that has long been a dream of physicists: the consummation of what Wheeler calls the "fiery marriage" between general relativity--the great theoretical system for studying the large-scale structure of the cosmos--and quantum mechanics--the mathematical tool for analyzing the diminutive world of the atomic nucleus.

The small band of theorists who can follow Hawking's intricate equations say that they are complex, elegant and inspired. This is all the more remarkable because he is unable to write them down. He must remember them as they flash into his mind, a feat that his colleague Werner Israel says is equivalent to Mozart's having composed an entire symphony in his head.

Despite his enormous handicaps, Hawking retains undiminished enthusiasm for his work and his family. He is the devoted father of two children, a son, 11, and a daughter, 7. His wife Jane, to whom he has been married for 13 years, often accompanies him to scientific meetings, where he inevitably draws a crowd. He also retains an impish sense of humor. He once offered to send Caltech's Kip Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse if Cygnus X-l turns out not to be a black hole.

"I want to understand why the universe exists at all and why it is as it is," says Hawking. His admirers are convinced that no one is more likely to succeed in that formidable task. Even as his physical condition deteriorates and he sits helpless in his wheelchair, his mind seems to soar ever more brilliantly across the vastness of space and time to unlock the secrets of the universe.

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