PROF MARIKA TAYLOR

Theoretical physicist at the University of Southampton and former PhD student of Prof Stephen Hawking.

I first met Stephen in 1995, to discuss options for my PhD. I was nervous, but he jumped straight into a conversation about physics, and he sent me away with a list of papers to read about string theory. He was already a celebrity by this point. When I was an undergraduate, he was living in an apartment just behind my student house, and friends would come to my room just to get a glimpse of him coming and going.

Because of his medical issues, Stephen couldn’t work problems out on paper. So his PhD students were really important to him – they could help do the calculations and develop his ideas. We were dragged right to the forefront of research.

During lunch, the conversation would often drift into politics, movies and music. His tastes were both highbrow and lowbrow. He liked arthouse films, but I remember him saying how much he enjoyed Babe – the movie about the talking pig – when we were all saying how rubbish it was. He had a wonderful smile, and because he was forced to communicate so concisely with his synthesiser, he had a gift for one-liners. Once, we were in a pub and he turned up the volume on his synthesiser and announced “I’m coming out”. He was referring to a change of mind he’d had on the black hole information paradox, but he clearly enjoyed winding up the entire pub. I’m going to miss his sense of warmth, his humour, his enthusiasm and spark.