Stephen Hawking, "Inventor of the Universe"

     I am Stephen Hawking.

     I was born to Dr. Frank Hawking, a research biologist, and Isobel Hawking. I had two younger sisters, Philippa and Mary and an adopted brother, Edward. Though my parents were living in North London, they moved to Oxford while my mother was pregnant with me, desiring a safer location for the birth of their first child (London was under attack at the time by the Nazis). In fact, a German V-2 missile struck only a few streets away. After I was born, the family moved back to London, where my father headed the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research. In 1950, my family and I moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire where I attended St. Albans High School for Girls from 1950 to 1953. (At that time, boys could attend the Girls school until the age of 10). From the age of 11, I attended St Albans School, where I was a good, but not exceptional, student. When asked later to name a teacher who had inspired me, I named my Mathematics teacher, Dikran Tahta. I maintain connection with the school, giving my name to one of the four houses and to an extracurricular science lecture series. I have visited to deliver one of the lectures and have also granted a lengthy interview to pupils working on the school magazine, The Albanian. I was always interested in science. I enrolled at University College, Oxford with the intent of studying mathematics, although my father would have preferred me to go into medicine. Since mathematics was not offered at University College, I instead chose physics. My interests during this time were in thermodynamics, relativity, and quantum mechanics. After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford University in 1962, I stayed to study astronomy. I decided to leave after learning that studying sunspots was all the observatory was equipped for. I arrived at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where I became engaged in the study of theoretical astronomy and cosmology. Almost as soon as I arrived at Cambridge, I started developing symptoms of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (known colloquially in the USA as Lou Gehrig's disease), a type of motor neuron disease which would cost me almost all neuromuscular control. During his first two years at Cambridge, I did nothing to distinguish myself, but, after the disease stabilized and with the help of Dennis William Sciama, I returned to working on my Ph.D. I then revealed that I did not see much point in obtaining a doctorate if I were to die soon. My life’s turning point came in 1965 with my marriage to Jane Wilde, a language student. After gaining it, my Ph.D., I became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. I was elected as one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1982, and became a Companion of Honour in 1989. I am also is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. As my paralysis increased due to my disease, this did not hinder my achievements. By 1974, I could no longer feed myself or get out of bed. When my speech became slurred only those who knew me could understand what I was trying to get across. In 1985, I caught pneumonia and had to have a tracheotomy, which no longer allowed me to speak. A Cambridge scientist built a device that enables me to write onto a computer with small movements of my body, and then have a voice synthesizer speak what exactly what I type. I had three children with my first wife, Jane Hawking, before we divorced: Robert (b. 1967), Lucy (b. 1969), and Timothy (b. 1979). Lucy, is a novelist. Robert, emigrated to the United States, married, and has one child, George Edward Hawking.

     In the late 1960s, I, along with Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. It lead to my proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity. I also supplied a mathematical proof, along with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson, of John Wheeler's "No-Hair Theorem" – namely, that any black hole is fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. I also suggested, upon analysis of gamma ray emissions, after the Big Bang, primordial mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, we proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, I calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate. In collaboration with Jim Hartle, we developed a model in which the universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North pole: One cannot travel north of the North Pole, as there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realisation that the no-boundary proposal is also consistent a not closed universe. I have also work with many other scientific investigations including the study of quantum cosmology, cosmic inflation, helium production in anisotropic Big Bang universes, large N cosmology, the density matrix of the universe, topology and structure of the universe, baby universes, Yang-Mills instantons and the S matrix, anti de Sitter space, quantum entanglement and entropy, the nature of space and time, including the arrow of time, spacetime foam, string theory, supergravity, Euclidean quantum gravity, the gravitational Hamiltonian, Brans-Dicke and Hoyle-Narlikar theories of gravitation, gravitational radiation, and wormholes. At a George Washington University lecture in honor of NASA's 50th anniversary, I theorized on the existence of extraterrestrial life, "primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare."

     Achievements
1975 Eddington Medal
1976 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society
1979 Albert Einstein Medal
1982 Order of the British Empire (Commander)
1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
1986 Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
1988 Wolf Prize in Physics
1989 Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord
1989 Companion of Honour
1999 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society
2003 Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University
2006 Copley Medal of the Royal Society
2008 Fonseca Price of the University of Santiago de Compostela
2009 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States
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