The Malta Independent on Sunday
‘I CANNOT SPEAK, I CANNOT MOVE, BUT MY MIND IS FREE’
niversary of Galileo’s death, coinciding almost to the day with Isaac Newton’s own birthday. Stephen however considered this as simply another coincidence as probably as many as 200,000 other babies were born with him on that day. He even occupied the same Chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge once held by Isaac Newton. Time, as fate always come round: he died on 14 March, 2018 the same day when Einstein was born in 1879.
His father Frank, a specialist in tropical medicine, and his mother Isobel had been to Oxford as students. He was a smart boy at St Albans, skinny and puny, uniform always in a mess, speaking fast and confused; his peers called his speech “Hawkingese”. He seemed to have been fun in class, witty, sometimes bullied as well as respected. His writing was untidy, his work shoddy and careless, never tied to his studies, brilliant at Mathematics. Aged 17 he went to Oxford getting a first-class degree that was the entry ticket to his research career in Cambridge. As an undergraduate he is remembered as laid-back, fun loving, athletic, enjoying life.
Gradually, ALS took over his body and confined him to a wheelchair. At 21, in 1963, he married Jane Wilde, a student friend and they had three children. The wheelchair did not shut him away from life: he loved life, he wanted to live life under his own terms, and he did. He spoke through a computer, his body was not free, but he even danced in his wheelchair and teasingly drove the wheelchair over students’ toes. It is said he sometimes drove his wheelchair over the toes of people he did not like, like Prince Charles, and regretting not having the opportunity to run over Margaret Thatcher’s toe!”
I cannot move, I cannot speak, but my mind is free! He eventually became the most famous theoretical physicist forwarding the unexpected link between the universe and quantum dynamics. Despite the fact that he never received a Nobel Prize for his theories as they were never verified by experiment, he received the more valuable Milner Prize worth millions of pounds.
Some of his achievements
The existence of Black Holes were first predicted by Einstein and Oppenheimer of atomic bomb fame who worked on this idea, suggesting that stars would collapse under their own gravity to a singularity with so massive a gravity that not even light can escape them. Hawking changed this attitude: black holes are not just sucking destructively, with Roger Penrose he theorised that an exploding singularity was what created the universe. That is, crushing everything into an infinitesimally small singularity, is the reverse of the creation theory of the Big Bang when everything is exploded out of singularity. He also went on to theorise on matter and anti matter, leading him to propose the radiation from the edge, called the Hawking Radiation that must come from a black hole. He wanted to find what is now called the theory of everything, a simple, elegant formula, or structure, or framework that would explain everything, most of all his astonishing theory that linked the large cosmos and gravity to the infinitesimally small sub-atomic particles.
Hawking was the person who explained how a huge explosion from a black hole’s singularity collapse some 15 billion years ago, was the starting point of our universe, a singularity exploding into matter and energy that clumped together to form us, life, planets, solar systems, stars, galaxies...
On God
Stephen Hawking was the scientist whose lasting gift to mankind is his linking the great theories of pioneers such as Newton and Einstein. He did actually conclude that God does not exist. “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
His words unleashed great discussions and great debates that had never really abated since the great arguments in the middle of the 19th century between divine creationism, and Darwin’s budding science of evolution. The Genesis creation and flood narratives were then questioned and the situation has never been really ironed out, so that Stephen Hawking’s assertion that he had come to the conclusion that “there is no God”, which raised many an eyebrow. But he appears to be calm embracing this view, and confident in this, indeed succumbing to the fact that it is enough during the one life we have, to lie back and appreciate this grand design of the universe. Incidentally, this somehow happens to remind of the predicament of a humble local priest, a great and brilliant poet, Dun Karm Psaila and what he says in “Il-Jien u lil hinn minnu” when he himself questions the existence of God. The poet simply decides to stop worrying, his faith is enough, his belief is enough, hearing the heart beat of his mother as a baby is enough, love should see him through. Only Stephen Hawking would not let go silently, he was grateful for a fruitful life more than anyone else was.
In realty the debate is still on, it has always been and as long as man believes and as long as there is faith it will keep going on and on, because no one and nothing is going to take away anxiety, curiosity, imagination, fear, love, hate, gratefulness, self-awareness, analysis, synthesis and other attributes from mankind which raise humanity that enormous step above other animals. After all, as Hawking himself once said, we are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of an average star; only we can understand the universe, and that is something monkeys cannot do. And that makes us so special.
He was aware that he had to keep looking at the stars but at the same time looking at his feet and being curious in the process, and asking questions – probably the same questions he asked himself when as a little boy his mother would make him lie down looking at the night sky in silence, just asking himself questions. And wondering about the stars.
Stephen Hawking’s ashes will be interred next to the remains of Isaac Newton, J.J. Thompson, Ernest Rutherford and 17 British monarchs in Westminster Abbey.