DR CHRISTOPHE GALFARD
Writer, science communicator and former PhD student of Prof Stephen Hawking.
I was Hawking’s PhD student from 2000 to 2006 at Cambridge University. I wasn’t really daunted by his celebrity – in the academic world, that’s kind of irrelevant – but what was daunting was that he was extremely hard to work with, in the sense that he wasn’t interested in scientific small talk. He only wanted to tackle the big questions: the hardest problems in theoretical physics. He had a rare intuition that I think is possessed by only a handful of scientists every century: he could see beyond the maths to the bigger picture. I worked with him on a type of string theory called M-theory that tries to combine everything we know about the Universe, and later we worked on the black hole information paradox, where black holes seemed to be leaking information from the Universe. Each time I showed him some new results, he would immediately know where to point the finger.
I got to spend a lot of time with him – his philosophy was to spend as much time as possible with his colleagues and students. While he didn’t do scientific small talk, he was always lively to be around. He’d joke and talk about movies and which restaurants to check out – he’d take us out to dinner for our birthdays. He was generous with his thoughts and his time, and his joy of life.
It’s always when you’re at the start of something that it’s the most fulfilling – when you’re just beginning to understand things, and there’s someone there to hold your hand and show you the way. He was that person for me, and the six years I spent with him were probably the richest and fullest of my life.