Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford, England. He often refers to the fact that his birth date coincided with the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's death. Hawking was the eldest child of an intellectual and accomplished family. His father, Frank Hawking, was a physician and research biologist who specialized in tropical diseases; his mother, Isobel, the daughter of a Glasgow physician and a well-read, lively woman, was active for many years in Britain's Liberal Party
A challenging life
British cosmologist Stephen William Hawking was born in England on Jan. 8, 1942 — 300 years to the day after the death of the astronomer Galileo Galilei. He attended University College, Oxford, where he studied physics, despite his father's urging to focus on medicine. Hawking went on to Cambridge to research cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole.
In early 1963, just shy of his 21st birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with motor neuron disease, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). He was not expected to live more than two years. Completing his doctorate did not appear likely. Yet, Hawking defied the odds, not only attaining his Ph.D. but also forging new roads into the understanding of the universe in the decades since.
As the disease spread, Hawking became less mobile and began using a wheelchair. Talking grew more challenging and, in 1985, an emergency tracheotomy caused his total loss of speech. A speech-generating device constructed at Cambridge, combined with a software program, serves as his electronic voice today, allowing Hawking to select his words by moving the muscles in his cheek.
Just before his diagnosis, Hawking met Jane Wilde, and the two were married in 1965. The couple had three children before separating. Hawking remarried in 1995 but divorced in 2006.
Stephen Hawking's earliest years were spent in Highgate, a London suburb. In 1950, when he was eight, the family moved to St. Albans, a cathedral town some twenty miles northwest of London. Two years later, his family enrolled him in St. Albans School, a private institution affiliated with the cathedral. As Michael White and John Gribbin describe the young schoolboy in Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, "He was eccentric and awkward, skinny and puny. His school uniform always looked a mess and, according to friends, he jabbered rather than talked clearly, having inherited a slight lisp from his father." Young Hawking's abilities made little impact on his teachers or fellow students. But he already knew he wanted to be a scientist, and by the time he reached his middle teens, he had decided to pursue physics or mathematics.
Gangly and unathletic, Hawking formed close friendships with a small group of other precocious boys at school. Intrigued by subjects that focused on measurable quantities and objective reasoning, Hawking began to show increasing skill at mathematics, and soon he was outdistancing his peers with high grades while spending very little time on homework. In 1958, Hawking and his friends built a primitive computer that actually worked. In the spring of 1959, Hawking won an open scholarship in natural sciences to University College, Oxford—his father's old college—and in October he enrolled there. It was at Oxford that his unusual abilities began to become more obvious. Hawking's ease at handling difficult problems made it seem to others that he didn't need to study. In Stephen Hawking's Universe, John Boslough wrote, "He took an independent and freewheeling approach to studies although his tutor, Dr. Robert Berman, recalls that he and other dons were aware that Hawking had a first-rate mind, completely different from his contemporaries."
In 1962, after receiving a first-class honors degree from Oxford, Hawking set off for Cambridge University to begin studying for a Ph.D. in cosmology . Now he was beginning to deal with some of the themes that would preoccupy him throughout his life. One of these was the poorly understood question of black holes. As scientists were later to realize, a black hole is a cosmic body that by its very nature can never be seen. One type of black hole is thought to be the remnant of a collapsed star, which possesses such intense gravity that nothing can escape from it, not even light. Hawking was also intrigued by "space-time singularities," those phenomena in the physical universe or moments in its history where physics seems to break down. In attempting to understand a black hole and the space-time singularity at its center, Hawking made pioneering studies, using formulas developed more than half a century earlier by Einstein.
Hawking received his Ph.D. in 1965 and obtained a fellowship in theoretical physics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He continued his work on black holes, frequently collaborating with Roger Penrose, a mathematician a decade his senior, who like Hawking was deeply interested in theories of space-time. Though still in his twenties, Hawking was beginning to acquire a reputation, and he would often attend conferences where he shocked people by questioning the findings of eminent scientists much older than himself.
In 1968, Hawking joined the staff of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. He and Penrose began using complex mathematics to apply the laws of thermodynamics to black holes. He continued to travel to America, the Soviet Union, and other countries, and in 1973, he published a highly technical book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, written with G. F. R. Ellis. Not long afterward, Hawking made a startling discovery: whereas virtually all previous thinking assumed that black holes could not emit anything, Hawking theorized that under certain conditions they could emit subatomic particles. These particles became known as Hawking Radiation.
In 1965, Hawking married Jane Wilde, and they had two sons and a daughter. The couple separated in 1990. Hawking suffers from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also called Lou Gehrig's disease, which confines him to a wheelchair and requires him to use a computer and voice synthesizer to speak.
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