Stephen Hawking

1

THE DAY GALILEO DIED

In an upscale restaurant near Cambridge city center, twelve young men and women sit around a large, linen-covered table set with plates and dishes, glasses, and cutlery. To one side is a man in a wheelchair. He is older than the others. He looks terribly frail, almost withered away to nothing, slumped motionless and seemingly lifeless against the black cloth cushion of his wheelchair. His hands, thin and pale, the fingers slender, lie in his lap. Set into the center of his sinewy throat, just below the collar of his open-necked shirt, is a plastic breathing device about two inches in diameter. But despite his disabilities, his face is alive and boyish, neatly brushed brown hair falling across his brow, only the lines beneath his eyes belying the fact that he is a contemporary of Keith Richards and Donald Trump. His head lolls forward, but from behind steel-rimmed spectacles his clear blue eyes are alert, raised slightly to survey the other faces around him. Beside him sits a nurse, her chair angled toward his as she positions a spoon to his lips and feeds him.

Occasionally she wipes his mouth.

There is an air of excitement in the restaurant. Around this man the young people laugh and joke, and occasionally address him or make a flippant remark in his direction. A moment later the babble of human voices is cut through by a rasping sound, a metallic voice, like something from the set of Star Wars—the man in the wheelchair makes a response that brings peals of laughter from the whole table. His eyes light up, and what has been described by some as the greatest smile in the world envelops his whole face. Suddenly you know that this man is very much alive.

As the diners begin their main course, there is a commotion at the restaurant’s entrance. A few moments later, the headwaiter walks toward the table escorting a smiling redhead in a fake-fur coat. Everyone at the table turns her way as she approaches, and there is an air of hushed expectation as she smiles across at them and says Hello to the gathering. She appears far younger than her years and looks terribly glamorous, a fact exaggerated by the general scruffiness of the young people at the table. Only the older man in the wheelchair is neatly dressed, in a plain jacket and neatly pressed shirt, his immaculately smart nurse beside him.

I’m so sorry I’m late, she says to the party. My car was wheel-clamped in London. Then she adds, laughing, There must be some cosmic significance in that!

Faces look toward her and smile, and the man in the wheelchair beams. She walks around the table toward him, as his nurse stands at his side. The woman stops two steps in front of the wheelchair, crouches a little, and says, Professor Hawking, I’m delighted to meet you. I’m Shirley MacLaine. He smiles up at her and the metallic voice simply says, Hello.

For the rest of the meal, Shirley MacLaine sits next to her host, plying him with question after question in an attempt to discover his views on subjects that concern her deeply. She is interested in metaphysics and spiritual matters. Having spoken to holy men and teachers around the world, she has formulated her own personal theories concerning the meaning of existence. She has strong beliefs about the meaning of life and the reason for our being here, the creation of the Universe, and the existence of God. But they are only beliefs. The man beside her is perhaps the greatest physicist of our time, the subjects of his scientific theories the origin of the Universe, the laws that govern its existence, and the eventual fate of all that has been created—including you, me, and Ms. Shirley MacLaine. His fame has spread far and wide; his name is known by millions around the world. She asks the professor if he believes that there is a God who created the Universe and guides His creation. He smiles momentarily, and the machine voice says, No.

The professor is neither rude nor condescending; brevity is simply his way. Each word he says has to be painstakingly spelled out on a computer attached to his wheelchair and operated by tiny movements of two of the fingers of one hand, almost the last vestige of bodily freedom he has. His guest accepts his words and nods. What he is saying is not what she wants to hear, and she does not agree—but she can only listen and take note, for, if nothing else, his views have to be respected.

Later, when the meal is over, the party leaves the restaurant and returns to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the university, and the two celebrities are left alone with the ever-present nurse in Professor Hawking’s office. For the next two hours, until tea is served in the common room, the Hollywood actress asks the Cambridge professor question after question.

By the time of their encounter in December 1988, Shirley MacLaine had met many people, the great and the infamous. Several times nominated for an Oscar and winner of one for her role in Terms of Endearment, she was probably a more famous name than her host that day. Doubtless, though, her meeting with Stephen Hawking will remain one of the most memorable of her life. For this man, weighing no more than ninety pounds and completely paralyzed, speechless, and unable to lift his head should it fall forward, has been proclaimed Einstein’s heir, the greatest genius of the late twentieth century, the finest mind alive, and even, by one journalist, Master of the Universe. He has made fundamental breakthroughs in cosmology and, perhaps more than anyone else alive, he has pushed forward our understanding of the Universe we live in. If that were not enough, he has won dozens of scientific prizes. He has been made a CBE—commander of the British empire—and then Companion of Honour by Queen Elizabeth II and has written a popular science book, A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the best-seller list for five years from 1988 to 1993 and has to date sold over ten million copies worldwide.

How did all this happen? How has a man with a progressive wasting disease fought off the ravages of his disability to overcome every obstacle in his path and win through? How has he managed to achieve far more than the vast majority of able-bodied people would ever have dreamed of accomplishing?

To casual visitors, the city of Oxford in January 1942 would have appeared little changed since the outbreak of the Second World War two and a half years earlier. Only upon closer inspection would they perhaps have noticed the gun emplacements dotted around the city, the fresh camouflage paint in subdued khaki and gray, the high towers protruding from the car plants at Cowley, east of the dreaming spires, and the military trucks and personnel carriers periodically trundling over Magdalen Bridge and along the High, where frost lingered on the stone gargoyles.

Out in the wider world, the war was reaching a crucial stage. The previous month, on December 7, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States had joined the war. To the east, the Soviet army was fighting back Hitler’s troops in the Crimea, bringing about the first moves that would eventually precipitate the total defeat of both Germany and Japan.

In Britain every radio was tuned to J. B. Priestley presenting Post-Scripts to the News; there were Dr. Joad and Julian Huxley arguing over trivia and homely science on the Brains Trust; and the Forces’ sweetheart, Vera Lynn, was wowing the troops at home and abroad with We’ll Meet Again. Winston Churchill had just returned from his Christmas visit to America, where he had addressed both houses of Congress, rousing them with quotes from Lincoln and Washington and waving the V sign. Television was little more than a laboratory curiosity.

It is perhaps one of those oddities of serendipity that January 8, 1942, was both the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of one of history’s greatest intellectual figures, the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, and the day Stephen William Hawking was born into a world torn apart by war and global strife. But as Hawking himself points out, around two hundred thousand other babies were born that day, so maybe it is after all not such an amazing coincidence.

Stephen’s mother, Isobel, had arrived in Oxford only a short time before the baby was due. She lived with her husband Frank in Highgate, a northern suburb of London, but they had decided that she should move to Oxford to give birth. The reason was simple. Highgate, along with the rest of London and much of southern England, was being pounded by the German Luftwaffe night after night. However, the warring governments, in a rare display of equanimity, had agreed that if Germany refrained from bombing Oxford or Cambridge, the Royal Air Force would guarantee peaceful skies over Heidelberg and Göttingen. In fact, it has been said that Hitler had earmarked Oxford as the prospective capital of world government when his imagined global conquest had been accomplished and that he wanted to preserve its architectural splendor.

Both Frank and Isobel Hawking had been to Oxford before—as students. They both came from middle-class families. Frank Hawking’s grandfather had been quite a successful Yorkshire farmer but had seen his prosperity disappear in the great agricultural depression that immediately followed the First World War. Isobel, the second eldest of seven, was the daughter of a doctor in Glasgow. Neither family could afford university fees without making sacrifices, and in an age where far fewer women went on to higher education than we are now accustomed to, it demonstrated considerable liberalism on Isobel’s parents’ part that a university education was considered at all.

Their paths never crossed at Oxford, as Frank Hawking went up before his future wife. He studied medicine and became a specialist in tropical diseases. The outbreak of hostilities in 1939 found him in East Africa studying endemic medical problems. When he heard about the war, he decided to set off back to Europe, traveling overland across the African continent and then by ship to England, with the intention of volunteering for military service. However, upon arriving home he was informed that his skills would be far more usefully employed in medical research.

After leaving Oxford, Isobel had stumbled into a succession of loathed jobs, including a spell as an inspector of taxes. Leaving after only a few months, she decided to take a job for which she was ridiculously overqualified—as a secretary at a medical-research institute. It was there that the vivacious and friendly Isobel, mildly amused at the position she had found herself in but with sights set on a more meaningful future, first met the tall, shy young researcher fresh back from exciting adventures in exotic climes.

When he was two weeks old, Isobel Hawking took Stephen back to London and the raids. They almost lost their lives when he was two, when a V-2 rocket hit a neighbor’s house. Although their home was damaged, the Hawkings were out at the time.

After the war, Frank Hawking was appointed head of the Division of Parasitology at the National Institute of Medical Research. The family stayed on in the house in Highgate until 1950, when they moved twenty miles north to a large rambling house at 14 Hillside Road in the city of St. Albans in Hertfordshire.

St. Albans is a small city dominated by its cathedral, which can trace its foundation back to the year A.D. 303, when St. Alban was martyred and a church was built on the site. However, long before that, the Romans had realized the strategically useful position of the area. There they built the city of Verulamium, and the first Christian church was probably constructed from the Roman ruins left behind when the empire began to crumble and the soldiers returned home. In the 1950s, St. Albans was an archetypal, prosperous, middle-class English town. In the words of one of Hawking’s school friends, It was a terribly smug place, upwardly mobile, but so awfully suffocating.

Hawking was eight when the family arrived there. Frank Hawking had a strong desire to send Stephen to a private school. He had always believed that a private-school education was an essential ingredient for a successful career. There was plenty of evidence to support this view: in the 1950s, the vast majority of members of Parliament had enjoyed a privileged education, and most senior figures in institutions such as the BBC, the armed forces, and the country’s universities had been to private schools. Dr. Hawking himself had attended a minor private school, and he felt that even with this semi-elite background he had still experienced the prejudice of the establishment. He was convinced that, coupled with his own parents’ lack of money, this had held him back from achieving greater things in his own career and that others with less ability but more refined social mores had been promoted ahead of him. He did not want this to happen to his eldest son. Stephen, he decided, would be sent to Westminster, one of the best schools in the country.

When he was ten, the boy was entered for the Westminster School scholarship examination. Although his father was doing well in medical research, a scientist’s salary could never hope to cover the school fees at Westminster—such things were reserved for the likes of admirals, politicians, and captains of industry. Stephen had to be accepted into the school on his own academic merit; he would then have his fees paid, at least in part, by the scholarship. The day of the examination arrived and Stephen fell ill. He never sat for the entrance paper and consequently never obtained a place at one of England’s best schools.

Disappointed, Dr. Hawking enrolled his son at the local private school, St. Albans School, a well-known and academically excellent abbey school which had close ties with the cathedral extending back, according to some accounts, to the year A.D. 948. Situated in the heart of the city and close to the cathedral, St. Albans School had 600 boys when Stephen arrived there in September 1952. Each year was streamed as A, B, or C according to academic ability. Each boy spent five years in senior school, progressing from the first form to the fifth, at the end of which period he would sit for Ordinary (O) Level exams in a broad spectrum of subjects, the brighter boys taking eight or nine examinations. Those who were successful at O Level would usually stay on to sit for Advanced (A) Levels in preparation for university two years later.

In 1952 there were on average three applicants for every place at St. Albans School and, as with Westminster, each prospective candidate had to take an entrance examination. Stephen was well prepared. He passed easily and, along with exactly ninety other boys, was accepted into the school on September 23, 1952. The fees were fifty-one guineas (£53.55) a term.

The image of Stephen at this time is that of the schoolboy nerd in his gray school uniform and cap as caricatured in the Billy Bunter stories and Tom Brown’s Schooldays. He was eccentric and awkward, skinny and puny. His school uniform always looked a mess and, according to friends, he jabbered rather than talking clearly, having inherited a slight lisp from his father. His friends dubbed his speech Hawkingese. All this had nothing to do with any early signs of illness; he was just that sort of kid—a figure of classroom fun, teased and occasionally bullied, secretly respected by some, avoided by most. It appears that at school his talents were open to some debate: when he was twelve, one of his friends bet another a bag of sweets that Stephen would never come to anything. As Hawking himself now says modestly, I don’t know if this bet was ever settled and, if so, which way it was decided.¹

By the third year Stephen had come to be regarded by his teachers as a bright student, but only a little above average in the top class in his year. He was part of a small group that hung around together and shared the same intense interest in their work and pursuits. There was the tall, handsome figure of Basil King, who seems to have been the cleverest of the group, reading Guy de Maupassant at the age of ten and enjoying opera while still in short trousers. Then there was John McClenahan, short, with dark brown hair and a round face, who was perhaps Stephen’s best friend at the time. Fair-haired Bill Cleghorn was another of the group, completed by the energetic and artistic Roger Ferneyhaugh, and a newcomer in the third form, Michael Church. Together they formed the nucleus of the brightest of the bright students in class 3A.

The little group was definitely the smart kids of their year. They all listened to the BBC’s Third Programme on the radio, now known as Radio 3, which played only classical music. Instead of listening under the sheets to early rock ’n’ roll or the latest cool jazz from the States, Mozart, Mahler, and Beethoven would trickle from their radios to accompany last-minute physics revision for a test the next day or the geography homework due the next morning. They read Kingsley Amis and Aldous Huxley, John Wyndham, C. S. Lewis, and William Golding—the smart books. Pop music was on the other side of the great divide, infra dig, slightly vulgar. They all went to concerts at the Albert Hall. A few of them played instruments, but Stephen was not very dexterous with his hands and never mastered a musical instrument. The interest was there, but he could never progress beyond the rudiments, a source of great regret throughout his life. Their shared hero was Bertrand Russell, at once intellectual giant and liberal activist.

St. Albans School proudly boasted a very high intellectual standard, a fact recognized and appreciated by the Hawkings very soon after Stephen started there. Before long, any nagging regrets that he had been unable to enter Westminster were forgotten. St. Albans School was the perfect environment for cultivating natural talent.

Much remembered and highly thought of was a master fresh out of university named Finlay who, way ahead of his time, taped radio programs and used them as launch points for discussion classes with 3A. The subject matter ranged from nuclear disarmament to birth control and everything in between. By all accounts, he had a profound effect on the intellectual development of the thirteen-year-olds in his charge, and his lessons are still fondly remembered by the journalists, writers, doctors, and scientists they have become today.

They were forever bogged down with masses of homework, usually three hours each night, and plenty more on weekends, after Saturday-morning lessons and compulsory games on Saturday afternoons. Despite the pressures, they still managed to find a little time to see each other out of school. Theirs was pretty much a monastic lifestyle. English schoolboys attending the private schools of the 1950s had little time for girls in their busy program, and parties were single-sex affairs until the age of fifteen or sixteen. It was only then that they would have the inclination and parental permission to hold sherry parties at their houses and practice the dance steps they had learned after school games on Saturdays at a dance studio in St. Albans city center.

Until they had graduated to such pleasures, the boys often went on long bicycle rides in the Hertfordshire countryside around St. Albans, sometimes going as far afield as Whipsnade, some fifteen miles away. Another favorite hobby was inventing and playing board games. The key characters in all this were Stephen and Roger Ferneyhaugh. Hawking, the embryonic scientist and logician already emerging, would devise the rules and laws of the games, while Ferneyhaugh designed the boards and pieces. The group would gather at parents’ houses during school holidays and on weekends, and set up the latest game on the bedroom floor or with glasses of orange squash on the sitting-room carpet.

First there was the War Game, based on the Second World War. Then came the Feudal Game, devised around the social, military, and political intricacies of medieval England, with the whole infrastructure meticulously developed. However, it soon became apparent that there was a major flaw in their games—Stephen’s rules were of such labyrinthine complexity that the enactment and consequences of a single move turned out to be so convoluted that sometimes a whole afternoon would be spent sorting them out. Often the games moved to 14 Hillside Road, and the boys would traipse up the stairs to Stephen’s cluttered bedroom near the top of the house.

By all accounts the Hawkings’ home was an eccentric place, clean but cluttered with books, paintings, old furniture, and strange objects gathered from various parts of the world. Neither Isobel nor Frank Hawking seemed to care too much about the state of the house. Carpets and furniture remained in use until they began to fall apart; wallpaper was allowed to dangle where it had peeled through old age; and there were many places along the hallway and behind doors where plaster had fallen away, leaving gaping holes in the wall.

Stephen’s room was apparently little different. It was the magician’s lair, the mad professor’s laboratory, and the messy teenager’s study all rolled into one. Among the general detritus and debris, half-finished homework, mugs of un-drunk tea, schoolbooks, and bits of model aircraft and bizarre gadgets lay in untended heaps. On the sideboard stood electrical devices, the uses of which could only be guessed at, and next to those a rack of test tubes, their contents neglected and discolored among the general confusion of odd pieces of wire, paper, glue, and metal from half-finished and forgotten projects.

The Hawking family was definitely an eccentric lot. In many ways they were a typically bookish family, but with a streak of originality and social awareness that made them ahead of their time. One contemporary of Hawking’s has described them as bluestocking. There were a lot of them; one photograph from the family album includes eighty-eight Hawkings. Stephen’s parents did some pretty oddball things. For many years the family car was a London taxi which Frank and Isobel had purchased for £50, but this was later replaced with a brand-new green Ford Consul—the archetypal late-fifties car. There was a good reason for buying it: they had decided to embark on a year-long overland expedition to India, and their old London taxi would never have made it. With the exception of Stephen, who could not interrupt his education, the whole family made the trip to India and back in the green Ford Consul, an astonishingly unusual thing to do in the late 1950s. Needless to say, the vehicle was not in its original pristine condition upon its return.

The Hawkings’ journeys outside St. Albans were not always so adventurous. Like many families, they kept a house trailer on the south coast of England; theirs was near Eastbourne in Sussex. Unlike other families, however, they owned not a modern version but a brightly colored gypsy caravan. Most summers the family spent two or three weeks walking the cliff tops and swimming in the bay. Often Stephen’s closest friend, John McClenahan, would join them, and the two boys would spend their time flying kites, eating ice cream, and thinking up new ways to tease Stephen’s two younger sisters, Mary and Philippa, while generally ignoring his adopted brother, Edward, who was only a toddler at the time.

Frank Hawking was significant in Stephen’s childhood and adolescence by his absence. He seems to have been a somewhat remote figure who would regularly disappear for several months each year to further his medical research in Africa, sometimes missing the family holidays in Ringstead Bay and leaving the children with Isobel. This routine was so well embedded in the structure of their lives that it was not until her late teens that Stephen’s eldest sister, Mary, realized that their family life was at all unusual—she had thought all fathers were like birds that migrated to sunnier climes each year. Whether at home or abroad, Frank Hawking kept meticulous accounts of everything he did in a collection of diaries maintained until the day he died. He also wrote fiction, completing several unpublished novels. One of his literary efforts was written from a woman’s viewpoint. Although Isobel respected his efforts when she read it, she believed that it was unsuccessful.

Isobel had an indisputable influence on her eldest son’s political ideas. She, like many other English intellectuals of the period, had politically left-of-center ideas that in her case led to active membership in the St. Albans Liberal Association in the 1950s. By then the Liberal Party was only a minor parliamentary force with just a handful of MPs, but at the grassroots level it remained a lively forum for political discussion, often taking the lead, during the 1950s and 1960s, on many issues of the time, including nuclear disarmament and opposition to apartheid. Stephen has never been extreme in his political views, but his interest in politics and his left-wing sympathies have never left him.

Stephen and his friends quickly tired of board games and moved on to other hobbies. They built model aircraft and electronic gadgets. The planes rarely flew properly, and Hawking was never as good with his hands as he was with his brain. His model aircraft were usually scruffy constructions of paper and balsa wood and far from aerodynamically efficient. With electronics he had similar setbacks, once receiving a 500-volt shock from an old television set he was trying to convert into an amplifier.

In the third and fourth forms, the motley gang of friends began to turn its attention toward the mystical and the religious. Toward the end of 1954, a boy on the periphery of the group, Graham Dow, got into religion in a very big way. The evangelist Billy Graham had toured Britain that year, and the young Dow had been greatly influenced by the man. Dow went on to convert Roger Ferneyhaugh, and the enthusiasm spread. Hawking’s attitude to this craze is open to debate. Most likely, he stood back from this particular game with a certain amused detachment; this at least is the opinion of his contemporaries. They speak of experiencing a towering intellect, looking on at the reaction of the participants more with fascination than with any feelings of conviction or budding faith.

Michael Church describes how he felt an indefinable intellectual presence when it came to discussing matters vaguely mystical or metaphysical with Stephen. Remembering one encounter, he says:

I wasn’t a scientist and didn’t take him remotely seriously until one day when we were messing around in his cluttered, joke-inventor’s den. Our talk turned to the meaning of life—a topic I felt pretty hot on at the time—when suddenly I was arrested by an awful realization: he was encouraging me to make a fool of myself, and watching me as though from a great height. It was a profoundly unnerving moment.²

Their interest in Christianity lasted for most of the year. The group of friends met at each other’s houses as they had done to play board games. They still drank orange squash and even played games occasionally, but for most of the time they would hold intense discussions on matters of faith, God, and their own feelings. It was a time of inner growth, a struggle to find meaning in the tumble of events and stimuli surrounding them, but it was also an important group activity. One member of the group has since intimated that there was an undoubted tinge of schoolboy homosexuality about the whole thing.

This was a difficult time for Stephen. He wanted to be involved, to be part of the group, but the rationalist in him would not, even then, allow his emotions to compromise his intellect. Yet he managed to keep his friends, remain detached, and learn a number of social skills that would hold him in good stead for the future. The irony is that at the end of the third year, at the height of the craze, Stephen won the school divinity prize.

After Christianity came the occult. The group began to turn its attention to extrasensory perception (ESP), which at the time was beginning to capture the public imagination. Together and in the privacy of their own dens, they started to conduct experiments during which they would attempt to influence the throw of a die by the power of their minds. Stephen was far more interested in this—it was quantifiable, real experimental work, and there was a chance that the idea could be proved or disproved. It was not simply a matter of faith and hope.

The craze did not last long. With the others, Stephen attended a lecture by a scientist who had made a study of a set of ESP experiments conducted at Duke University in North Carolina in the late fifties. The lecturer demonstrated that when the experimenters obtained good results the experiments could be shown to be faulty, and whenever the experimental technique was followed correctly, no results were obtained. Hawking’s interest turned to contempt. He came to the conclusion that it is only people who have not developed their analytical faculties beyond those of a teenager who believe in such things as ESP.³

Meanwhile, at school things carried on pretty much as before. Stephen was poor at all sports with the possible exception of cross-country running, for which his wraith-like physique was perfectly suited. He endured cricket and rugby, but special loathing was reserved for the Combined Cadet Force, the CCF. Like most private boys’ schools in Britain, St. Albans School maintains a schoolboy army, the original aim of which was to prepare young men for national service. Each Friday the entire school, with six exceptions, wore military uniform. The exceptions were those whose parents were conscientious objectors. Despite Isobel Hawking’s political leanings, Stephen’s parents did not object and he took part in the same war games, drills, and parades as the others.

For those with little interest in things military, the memories of the CCF are sour—cold winter Fridays in driving rain, clothes drenched through, biting January sleet numbing face and fingers, and the enthusiastic boy-officers yelling orders. Stephen had the rank of lance corporal in the Signals, the section into which those with a scientific bent were traditionally placed. By all accounts he hated every minute of it, but it was endured. In some respects the alternative was worse. Those who did not wish to play their part in defending Queen and Country had to run the gauntlet of persuasive tactics. First, the objector was taken to Colonel Pryke, commander of the CCF. If he did not manage to persuade the dissenter to join, the next line of attack was the sub-dean, Canon Feaver, a formidable gentleman who would subject the boy to a lecture on his moral duty to serve God and the Queen, to play his role in the greater scheme of things. If that were endured, the final test would be to face the headmaster, William Thomas Marsh.

Marsh was one of St. Albans’s most severe but successful headmasters. He has been described by more than one of Hawking’s contemporaries as absolutely terrifying; to cross him was an act of extreme foolishness. If the headmaster failed to convert a conscientious objector, then he must possess tremendous conviction and determination. However, that was only the beginning of the ordeal. Those who did not take part in the CCF were made to dress in fatigues along with everyone else and, instead of playing at soldiers, were forced to dig a Greek theater in the school grounds. Marsh was a dedicated Classicist, and he viewed this treatment as fitting ritualistic humiliation. The construction of the Greek theater continued, rain or shine, for as long as it took. As the work progressed, Marsh stalked its perimeter in fair weather or surveyed the site from the comfort of a warm room when it was raining or snowing.

Life at school was not always bleak. The whole class often went on school trips to places of academic interest. It was usually the CCF commander, Colonel Pryke, who was given the responsibility of taking what he referred to as a scruffy band of young men to such places as chemical plants, power stations, and museums. He remembers with fondness the occasion when he took Hawking’s class to the ICI chemical plant at Billingham in the north of England. Everything seemed to be going well until just after lunch, when one of the scientists who had been showing them around cornered Pryke and asked angrily, Who the hell have you got here? They’re asking me all sorts of bloody awkward questions I can’t answer!

By the time he was fourteen, Stephen knew that he wanted to make a career out of studying mathematics, and it was around this time that his scientific aptitude began to show. He would spend very little time on mathematics homework and still obtain full marks. As a contemporary recalled, "He had incredible, instinctive insight. While I would be worrying away at a complicated mathematical solution to a problem, he just knew the answer—he didn’t have to think about it."⁴ The average bright kid was beginning to reveal a prodigious talent.

One particular example of Stephen’s highly developed insight left a lasting impression on John McClenahan. During a sixth-form physics lesson, the teacher posed the question, If you have a cup of tea, and you want it with milk and it’s far too hot, does it get to a drinkable temperature quicker if you put the milk in as you pour the tea, or should you allow the tea to cool down before adding the milk? While his contemporaries were struggling with a muddle of concepts to argue the point, Stephen went straight to the heart of the matter and almost instantly announced the correct answer: Ah! Milk in first, of course, and then went on to give a thorough explanation of his reasoning: because a hot liquid cools more quickly than a cool one, it pays to put the milk in first, so that the liquid cools more slowly.

He sailed through his Ordinary Level exams, obtaining nine in July 1957 and his tenth, in Latin, a year later, midway through his Advanced Levels. When he sat down to decide on his A Level subjects, parental pressure began to play a part in his plans. He wanted to do mathematics, physics, and further mathematics in preparation for a university course in physics or mathematics. However, Frank Hawking had other plans. He wanted his son to follow him into a career in medicine, for which Stephen would have to study A Level chemistry. After much discussion and argument, Stephen agreed to take mathematics, physics, and chemistry A Levels, leaving open the question of his university course until the need for a final decision arose a year later.

The sixth form was probably Hawking’s happiest time at St. Albans. The boys were allowed greater freedom in their final two years, and they basked a little in the respect they had gained by their success at O Level. In the sixth form, the close group of school-friends began to fragment as their A Level subjects diverged. Those taking arts subjects began, quite naturally, to lose touch with the scientists, and different cliques established themselves. Basil King, John McClenahan, and Hawking