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Roaming the Cosmos
by Le0on Jaroff
Darkness has fallen on Cambridge, England, and on a damp and chilly evening king‘s Parade is filled with students and faculty. Then, down the crowded thoroughfare comes the University of Cambridge‘s most distinctive vehicle, bearing its most distinguished citizen. In the motorized wheelchair, boyish face dimly illuminated by a glowing computer screen attached to the left armrest, is Stephen William Hawking, 46, one of the world‘s greatest theoretical physicists. As he skillfully maneuvers through the crowd, motorists slow down, some honking their horns in greeting. People wave and shout hello.
A huge smile lights up Hawking‘s bespectacled face, but he cannot wave or shout back. Since his early 20s, he has suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive deterioration of the central nervous system that usually causes death within three or four years. Hawking‘s illness has advanced more slowly, and now seems almost to have stabilized. Still, it has robbed him of virtually all movement. He has no control over most of his muscles, cannot dress or eat by himself and has lost his voice. Now he "speaks" only by using the slight voluntary movement left in his hands and fingers to operate his wheelchair‘s built-in computer and voice synthesizer.
While ALS has made Hawking a virtual prisoner in his own body, it has left his courage and humor intact, his intellect free to roam. And roam it does, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the subatomic realm to the far reaches of the universe. In the course of these mental expeditions, Hawking has conceived startling new theories about black holes and the disorderly events that immediately followed the Big Bang from which the universe sprang. More recently, he has shaken both physicists and theologians by suggesting that the universe has no boundaries, was not created and will not be destroyed.
Most of Stephen Hawking‘s innovative thinking occurs at Cambridge, where he is Lucasian professor of mathematics, a seat once occupied by Isaac Newton. There, in the Department of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, he benevolently reigns over the relativity group, 15 overachieving graduate students from nine countries. On his office door is a small plaque irreverently reading QUIET, PLEASE. THE BOSS IS ASLEEP.
Hardly. From midmorning until he departs for dinner around 7 p. m., Hawking follows a routine that would tax the most able-bodied, working in his book-lined office, amid photographs of his wife Jane and their three children. When he rolled into the department‘s common room one morning last month, his students were talking shop around low tables. Maneuvering to one of the tables, Hawking clicked his control switch, evoking tiny beeps from his computer and selecting words from lists displayed on his screen. These words, assembled in sequence at the bottom of the screen, finally issued from the voice synthesizer: "Good morning. Can I have coffee?" Then, for the benefit of a visitor: "I am sorry about my American accent." (The synthesizer is produced by a California company.)
When the conversation shifted to creativity and how mathematicians seem to reach a creative peak in their early 20s, Hawking‘s computer beeped. "I‘m over the hill," he said, to a chorus of laughter.
Hawking was born on Jan. 8, 1942-300 years to the day, he often notes, after the death of Galileo. As a small boy, he was slow to learn to read but liked to take things apart though he confesses that he was never very good at putting things back together. When he was twelve, he recalls humorously, "one of my friends bet another friend a bag of sweets that I would never come to anything. I don‘t know if this bet was ever settled and, if so, who won.