Two Years to Live

In 1963, a young man of twenty-one lay in a hospital in London while doctors carried out test after test.

He had been growing clumsy. He tripped on stairs and fumbled with his shoelaces. His speech had begun to slur a little. When the results came back, the doctors told him he had motor neurone disease, an illness that slowly destroys the nerves that control the muscles. There was no cure. They expected him to live perhaps two more years.

His name was Stephen Hawking. He was a student of physics, and until then he had not been working very hard.

A clever, lazy student

Stephen was born in Oxford, England, on 8 January 1942. His parents had both studied at Oxford University, and his home was full of books. As a boy he took apart clocks and radios, though he admitted he was not always good at putting them back together.

He went to Oxford University to study physics at seventeen. By his own account, he found the work easy and did very little of it, spending more time rowing on the river with friends than studying. He still did well, and went on to Cambridge to work towards a doctorate on the beginnings of the universe.

It was during his first year at Cambridge that the illness was found.

Something to live for

At first, he wrote later, he fell into a gloom. He could not see the point of finishing a doctorate if he would not live to use it.

Two things changed his mind. In the hospital, he had seen a boy in a nearby bed die of leukaemia, and it made him realise that others had worse luck than his. And shortly before his diagnosis he had met Jane Wilde, a student of languages. They fell in love and became engaged. Now he had a reason to work, and a future to plan.

The disease also moved more slowly than the doctors had feared. Stephen threw himself into his research. He married Jane in 1965, and they had three children: Robert, Lucy and Tim.

Black holes are not so black

Hawking worked on some of the biggest questions in science. With the mathematician Roger Penrose, he showed that, according to Einstein's theory of gravity, the universe must have begun from a single point, which we now call the Big Bang.

Then, in 1974, he announced a surprising discovery. Black holes are places in space where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, was thought to escape. Hawking combined two great theories of physics and showed that black holes should in fact give off a faint glow of radiation, and very slowly shrink. Scientists call it Hawking radiation.

That same year, at thirty-two, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the youngest people ever to receive that honour. In 1979 he became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a post once held by Isaac Newton.

A new voice

By then he used a wheelchair, and his speech was hard for most people to understand. In 1985, while visiting Switzerland, he caught pneumonia and nearly died. To save his life, doctors operated on his throat. After that, he could not speak at all.

For a while he spelled out words by raising his eyebrows as someone pointed to letters on a card. Then a computer programmer in America sent him a program that let him choose words on a screen and have a machine speak them aloud. The voice it gave him had an American accent. He kept it for the rest of his life, even when better ones became available, because he said it had become his own.

He wrote slowly, a few words a minute. Yet in 1988 he published A Brief History of Time, a book that explained the universe to ordinary readers. It sold more than ten million copies and made him one of the most famous scientists in the world.

A long life

Stephen Hawking appeared on television, travelled the world, and at sixty-five floated weightless in a special aircraft, delighted. He spoke often about disabled people's right to full lives, and about the importance of curiosity.

He died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, aged seventy-six. He had lived fifty-five years longer than the doctors had predicted. His ashes were laid in Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.

Want to read more?

Hawking's own My Brief History is a short, honest and often funny memoir of his life. A Brief History of Time is still one of the best introductions to black holes and the Big Bang.