Even if you don't keep
a close eye on new developments in physics, you've probably heard of the
renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. He's prided himself on making his complex
physical concepts accessible to the public and writing the bestseller, "A
Brief History of Time."
And if you are a fan of Conan O'Brien,
"The Simpsons" or "Star Trek," you might have seen him
brandishing his cool wit during guest appearances on those shows.
Even if you are familiar with his academic
work, however, there are many interesting facts you might not know about
Hawking, stretching from his time at school and gradual development of
disability to his opinions on the future of the human race.
Many find it surprising, for instance, that,
despite his influential body of work, Hawking hasn't yet been awarded the Nobel Prize.
We'll talk about some of the remarkable distinctions he has received, however.
Another interesting fact: Hawking was born on
Jan. 8, 1942, which just happened to be the 300th anniversary of Galileo's
death.
But this has just been the warm-up. Next,
we'll delve into some fascinating and unexpected facts about Hawking, including
some things about his profoundly inspirational story.
These days, we know
Hawking as a brilliant mind whose theories are difficult for a nonscientific
mind to grasp. This is why it may come as a shock to learn that Hawking was a
slacker when it came to his school studies.
In fact, when he was 9 years old, his grades
ranked among the worst in his class .
With a little more effort, he brought those grades up to about average, but not
much better.
Nevertheless, from an early age he was
interested in how stuff worked. He has talked about how he was known to
disassemble clocks and radios. However, he admits
he wasn't very good at putting them back together so they could work again.
Despite his poor grades, both his teachers and
his peers seemed to understand that they had a future genius among them,
evidenced by the fact that his nickname was "Einstein."
The problem with his mediocre grades was that
his father wanted to send him to Oxford, but didn't have themoney without a scholarship.
Luckily, when it came time for the scholarship exams, he aced them, getting an
almost perfect score on the physics exam.
Stephen Hawking took a
liking to mathematics from an early age, and he would have liked to have
majored in it. His father, Frank, however, had different ideas. He hoped
Stephen would instead study medicine.
But, for all his interest in science, Stephen
didn't care for biology. He has said that he found it to be "too inexact,
too descriptive". He
would have rather devoted his mind to more precise, well-defined concepts.
One problem, however, was that Oxford didn't
have mathematics as a major. The compromise was that Stephen would attend
Oxford and major in physics.
In fact, even within physics, he focused on
the bigger questions. When faced with deciding between the two tracks of particle
physics, which studies the behavior of subatomic particles, versus cosmology,
which studies the large universe as a whole, he chose the latter. He chose
cosmology despite the fact that, at that time, he says, it was "hardly
recognised as a legitimate field" .
In explaining why, he said that particle
physics "seemed like botany. There were all these particles, but no
theory"
Biographer Kristine
Larsen writes about how Hawking faced isolation and unhappiness during his
first year or so at Oxford. The thing that seems to have drawn him out of this
funk was joining the rowing team.
Even before being diagnosed with a physically
disabling illness, Hawking didn't have what one would call a large or athletic
build. However, row teams recruited smaller men like Hawking to be coxswains --
a position that does not row, but rather controls steering and stroke rate.
Because rowing was so important and
competitive at Oxford, Hawking's role on the team made him very popular.
Remembering Hawking from those days, one fellow boatsman called him "the
adventurous type"
But as much as the rowing team helped his
popularity, it hurt his study habits. Occupied with rowing practice for six
afternoons per week, Hawking started "to cut serious corners" and
used "creative analysis to create lab reports"
A
NUCLEAR CLOUD
When asked why she was willing to marry him, Jane said that in
those times they lived under the "most awful nuclear cloud -- that with a
four minute warning the world itself could likely end." She says they
wanted "to make the most of whatever gifts were given us"
As a graduate student,
Hawking gradually started showing symptoms of tripping and general clumsiness.
His family became concerned when he was home during his Christmas break from
school and they insisted he see a doctor.
Before seeing a specialist, however, he
attended a New Year's party where he met his future wife, Jane Wilde. She
remembers being attracted to his "his sense of humor and his independent
personality."
He turned 21 a week later, and shortly after
he entered the hospital for two weeks of tests to discover what was wrong with
him. He was then diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known
as Lou Gehrig's disease, which is a neurological disease that causes patients
to lose control of their voluntary muscles. He was told he'd probably only have
a few years to live.
Hawking remembers being shocked and wondering
why this happened to him. However, seeing a boy dying of leukemia in the
hospital made him realize that there were others worse off than him.
Hawking became more optimistic and started
dating Jane. They were soon engaged, and he cites their engagement as giving
him "something to live for"
INSEPARABLE
BUDDIES: SPACE AND TIME
Time also fits into the Earth comparison. Because Einstein
showed that space and time are relative to each other, physicists measure them
together in spacetime. And, because of this relationship and
mathematical observations showing the universe is expanding, physicists believe
time is affected by the expansion of the universe.
One of Hawking's major
achievements (which he shares with Jim Hartle) was to come up with the theory
that the universe has no boundaries in 1983.
In 1983, the effort to understand the nature
and shape of the universe, Hawking and Hartle combined the concepts of quantum
mechanics (the study of the behavior of microscopic particles) with general
relativity (Einstein's theories aboutgravity and
how mass curves space) to show that the universe is a contained entity and yet
has no boundaries.
To conceptualize this, he tells people to
think of the universe like the surface of the Earth. As a sphere, you can go in
any direction on the surface of the Earth and never reach a corner, an edge or
any boundary where the Earth can be said to "end." However, one major
difference is that the surface of the Earth is two-dimensional (even though the
Earth itself is three-dimensional, the surface is only two-dimensional), while
the universe is four-dimensional.
Hawking explains that spacetime (see the
sidebar on this page) is like the lines of latitude on the globe. Starting at
the North Pole (the beginning of the universe) and going south, the
circumferences get bigger until beyond the equator, when they would get
smaller. This means that the universe is finite in spacetime and will
re-collapse eventually -- however, not for at least 20 billion years .
Does this mean that time itself would go backwards? Hawking grappled with this
question, but decided no, because there is no reason to believe that the
universe's trend from ordered energy into disordered energy will reverse
A
SINGULAR EVENT
A singularity is a point of spacetimewhere
Einstein's idea of general relativity breaks down because the gravitational
forces are so strong. Theoretical physicists believe this happens when a black
hole is formed, and may have happened at the creation of our universe
Hawking's No-Boundary Proposal, however, suggests the world did not begin in a
singularity.
In 2004, the genius
Hawking admitted he had been wrong and conceded a bet he made in 1997 with a
fellow scientist aboutblack holes.
To understand the bet, let's backpedal a little to understand what black holes
are in the first place.
Stars are gigantic -- they have so much mass
that their gravityis
always incredibly strong. This is fine, as long as the starcontinues to burn its
nuclear fuel, exerting this energy outward, thus counteracting gravity.
However, once a massive enough star "dies" or burns out, gravity becomes
the stronger force, and causes that big star to collapse on itself. This
creates what scientists call a black hole.
The gravity is so powerful in this collapse
that not even light can escape. However, Hawking proposed in 1975 that black
holes are not really black. Rather, they radiate energy.
But, he said at the time, information is lost
in the black hole that eventually evaporates. The problem was that this idea
that information is lost conflicted with the rules of quantum mechanics,
creating what Hawking called an "information paradox."
American theoretical physicist John Preskill
disagreed with this conclusion that information is lost in black hole. In 1997,
he made a bet with Hawking saying that information can escape from them, thus
not breaking the laws of quantum mechanics.
Hawking is such a good sport that he can admit
when he's wrong -- which he did in 2004. While giving a lecture at a scientific
conference, he said that because black holes have more than one
"topology," and when one measures all the information released from
all topologies, information isn't lost
President Obama gives
Hawking the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009.
In his long career in
physics, Hawking has racked up an incredibly impressive array of awards and
distinctions. We don't hope to be exhaustive in this small space, but we'll go
over some of the highlights.
In 1974, he was inducted into the Royal
Society (the royal academy of science in the U.K., dating back to 1660), and a
year later, Pope Paul VI awarded him and Roger Penrose the Pius XI Gold Medal
for Science. He also went on to receive the Albert Einstein Award and Hughes
Medal from the Royal Society.
Hawking had so well established himself in the
academic world by 1979 that he attained the post of Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England -- a position he would
keep for the next 30 years. The chair dates all the way back to 1663, and the
second person to hold it was none other than Sir Isaac Newton.
In the 1980s, he was invested as a Commander
of the British Empire, which is a rank in the U.K. just under being knighted.
He also became a Companion of Honour, which is another distinction given in
recognition of national service. There can be no more than 65 members of the
order at one time.
In 2009, Hawking was awarded the United
States' highest civilian honor of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
All the while, Hawking attained at least 12
honorary degrees. However, the Nobel Prize continues
to elude him.
one of the most
unexpected facets of Stephen Hawking's resume is that of being a children's
book author. In 2007, Stephen and his daughter, Lucy Hawking, collaborated to
write "George's Secret Key to the Universe."
The book is a fiction story about a young boy,
George, who rebels against his parents' aversion to technology. He begins to
befriend neighbors, one of whom is a physicist with acomputer. This turns out
to be most powerful computer in the world, which offers portals to see and
enter into outer space.
Of course, much of the book is meant to
explain heavy scientific concepts, such as black holes and
the origin of life, to children. In this context, it is very fitting that
Hawking, who has always sought to make his work more accessible, would want to
write such a book.
The book was written to be the first of a
trilogy that would continue George's adventures. The next one in the series
came out in 2009 and is called "George's Cosmic Treasure Hunt."
Considering all of
Hawking's work in cosmology, people are understandably interested in his
opinions on the possibility of alien life. During NASA's 50th
anniversary celebration in 2008, Hawking was invited to speak, and he mentioned
his thoughts on the subject.
He expressed that, given the vastness of the
universe, there very well could be primitive alien life out there, and it is
possible, other intelligent life.
"Primitive life is very common,"
Hawking said, "and intelligent life is very rare." Of course, he
threw in his characteristically sharp humor to say, "Some would say it has
yet to occur onEarth" .
He went on the say that humans should be wary of exposure to aliens because
alien life will probably not be DNA-based, and we would not have resistance to
diseases.
Hawking also did an episode on the possibility
of aliens for "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking" on the
Discovery Channel .
In this episode, he explains that aliens might
use up their own planet's resources and "become nomads, looking to conquer
and colonize whatever planets they could reach." Or, they could set up a
mirror system to focus all the energy of the sun in one area, creating a
wormhole -- a hole to travel through spacetime.
In 2007, when Stephen
Hawking was 65 years old, he got to take the ride of a lifetime. He was able to
experience zero-gravity and
float out of his wheelchair thanks to Zero Gravity Corp. The service involves
an airplane ride
in which sharp ascent and descent allows passengers to experience
weightlessness in flight for several rounds, each about 25-seconds long.
Hawking, free from his wheelchair for the
first time in four decades, was even able to perform gymnastic flips. Hawking
also has booked a seat with Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic to ride on a
sub-orbital flight.
But perhaps most interesting about this is not
what he was able to do, but why he did it. When asked about why he wanted to do
this, he of course cited his desire to go into space. But his reasons for going
and his overall support for space travel went deeper than that.
Due to the possibility of global warming or
nuclear war, Hawking has said that the future of the human race, if it is going
to have a long one, will be in outer space]. He supports
private space exploration in hopes that space tourism will become affordable
for the public. He hopes that we can travel to other planets to use their
resources to survive .
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