Stephen Hawking

Early life Family

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 His wealthy paternal great-grandfather, from Yorkshire, over-extended himself buying farm land and then went bankrupt in the great agricultural depression during the early 20th century.

In 1950, when Hawking's father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research, the family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire. There, the family was considered highly intelligent and somewhat eccentric; meals were often spent with each person silently reading a book. They lived a frugal existence in a large, cluttered, and poorly maintained house and travelled in a converted London taxicab. During one of Hawking's father's frequent absences working in Africa, the rest of the family spent four months in Mallorca visiting his mother's friend Beryl and her husband, the poet Robert Graves.

Primary and secondary school years Hawking began his schooling at the Byron House School in Highgate, London. He later blamed its "progressive methods" for his failure to learn to read while at the school. In St Albans, the eight-year-old Hawking attended St Albans High School for Girls for a few months. At that time, younger boys could attend one of the houses.

Hawking attended two private (i.e. fee-paying) schools, first Radlett School and from September 1952, St Albans School, Hertfordshire, The family placed a high value on education. Hawking's father wanted his son to attend Westminster School, but the 13-year-old Hawking was ill on the day of the scholarship examination. His family could not afford the school fees without the financial aid of a scholarship, so Hawking remained at St Albans. A positive consequence was that Hawking remained close to a group of friends with whom he enjoyed board games, the manufacture of fireworks, model aeroplanes and boats, and long discussions about Christianity and extrasensory perception. From 1958 on, with the help of the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, they built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components. In 1959, he built a record player from spare parts: "My father would have regarded it as recklessly self-indulgent, to buy a record player, but I persuaded him that I could assemble one from parts that I could buy cheap. That appealed to him as a Yorkshireman." he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in October 1962.

Hawking's thesis, Properties of Expanding Universes, was approved in 1966. He also received a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge; he obtained his PhD degree in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology, in March 1966; and his essay "Singularities and the Geometry of Space–Time" shared top honours with one by Penrose to win that year's prestigious Adams Prize. In 1969, Hawking accepted a specially created Fellowship for Distinction in Science to remain at Caius.

Collaborating with Penrose, Hawking extended the singularity theorem concepts first explored in Properties of Expanding Universes. This included not only the existence of singularities, but also the theory that the universe might have started as a singularity. Their joint essay was the runner-up in the 1968 Gravity Research Foundation competition. In 1970, they published a proof that if the universe obeys the theory of general relativity, and fits any of the models of physical cosmology developed by Alexander Friedmann, then it must have begun as a singularity. Hawking and James M. Bardeen developed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. Hawking's second law mentions gravitational waves—waves of warped spacetime caused by the changing gravitational field around two black holes merging. First proposed by Oliver Heaviside in 1893, they were theoretical until they were first observed in 2015. Hawking's law states that even though black holes lose energy (or "have an entropy") from gravitational waves and increasing angular momentum from their rotation, which can both reduce its surface area, the total surface area of two merged black holes must increase or remain the same.

Around this time, Hawking moved into the study of quantum gravity and quantum mechanics. This was spurred by a visit to Moscow, in which he talked with Yakov Zeldovich and Alexei Starobinsky, whose work showed that, according to the uncertainty principle, rotating black holes emit particles. To Hawking's annoyance, his calculations to prove their work produced findings that contradicted his second law. It did, however, support Jacob Bekenstein's 1972 theory that black holes have an entropy proportional to the area of the event horizon. Hawking's law was nonetheless validated in 2025 by analysis of black hole merger GW250114.

In 1974, Hawking claimed that black holes emit radiation, known today as Hawking radiation, which may continue until they exhaust their energy and evaporate. by the late 1970s, the discovery was widely accepted as a significant breakthrough in theoretical physics. While some experimental teams have claimed detection of Hawking radiation from acoustic and optical analogues of black holes, some of these results remain in doubt. The search for Hawking radiation from astrophysical ones continues in the twenty-first century. thumb A 2009 image of the black hole candidate Cygnus X-1 by the Chandra X-ray ObservatoryHawking was appointed to the Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1974. He worked with a friend on the faculty, Kip Thorne, and in 1976 the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Maxwell Medal and Prize, and the Hughes Medal. He was appointed a professor with a chair in gravitational physics in 1977. The following year, he received the Albert Einstein Medal and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.

In 1979, Hawking was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. His inaugural lecture in this role was titled: "Is the End in Sight for Theoretical Physics?" and proposed N = 8 supergravity as the leading theory to solve many of the outstanding problems physicists were studying. His promotion coincided with a health-crisis which led to his accepting, albeit reluctantly, some nursing services at home. At the same time, he was also making a transition in his approach to physics, becoming more intuitive and speculative rather than insisting on mathematical proofs. "I would rather be right than rigorous", he told Kip Thorne. In 1981, he proposed that information in a black hole is irretrievably lost when a black hole evaporates. This information paradox violates the fundamental tenet of quantum mechanics, and led to years of debate, including "the Black Hole War" with Leonard Susskind and Gerard 't Hooft.

Hawking pursued his work in physics: in 1993, he co-edited a book on Euclidean quantum gravity with Gary Gibbons and published a collected edition of his own articles on black holes and the Big Bang. In 1994, at Cambridge's Newton Institute, Hawking and Penrose delivered a series of six lectures that were published in 1996 as "The Nature of Space and Time".

In 1997, he conceded a 1991 public scientific wager made with Kip Thorne and John Preskill of Caltech. Hawking had bet that Penrose's proposal of a "cosmic censorship conjecture"that there could be no "naked singularities" unclothed within a horizonwas correct. After discovering his concession might have been premature, a more refined wager was made, specifying that such singularities would occur without extra conditions. The same year, Thorne, Hawking, and Preskill made another bet, this time concerning the black hole information paradox. In August 2015, Hawking said that not all information is lost when something enters a black hole and there might be a possibility to retrieve information from a black hole according to his theory. thumb Hawking in 2006As part of another longstanding scientific dispute, Hawking had emphatically argued, and bet, that the Higgs boson would never be found. The particle was proposed to exist as part of the Higgs field theory by Peter Higgs in 1964. Hawking and Higgs engaged in a heated and public debate over the matter in 2002 and again in 2008, with Higgs criticising Hawking's work and complaining that Hawking's "celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have". The particle was discovered in July 2012 at CERN following construction of the Large Hadron Collider. Hawking quickly conceded that he had lost his bet

In 2007, Hawking and his daughter Lucy published George's Secret Key to the Universe, a children's book designed to explain theoretical physics in an accessible fashion and featuring characters similar to those in the Hawking family. The book was followed by sequels in 2009, 2011, 2014 and 2016.

During his career, Hawking supervised 39 successful PhD students.

Properties of Expanding Universes was made publicly accessible by Cambridge University in October 2017. It quickly became the most requested item in the university's open-access repository. The interview was broadcast in April 2018, after his death, as the Smithsonian TV Channel documentary Leaving Earth: Or How to Colonize a Planet.

Hawking's final paper, A smooth exit from eternal inflation?, was posthumously published in the Journal of High Energy Physics on 27 April 2018. In October 2018, one of his final research studies, entitled Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair, was published, and dealt with the fate of information which enters black holes. Also that October, Hawking's last book was published, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, containing his final comments on what he believed were the most important questions facing humankind.

Personal views Relevance of philosophy

At Google's Zeitgeist Conference in 2011, Stephen Hawking said that "philosophy is dead". He believed that philosophers "have not kept up with modern developments in science", "have not taken science sufficiently seriously and so Philosophy is no longer relevant to knowledge claims", "their art is dead" and that scientists "have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge". He said that philosophical problems can be answered by science, particularly new scientific theories which "lead us to a new and very different picture of the universe and our place in it". His view was both praised and criticised. He said, "Love, faith, and morality belong to a different category to physics. You cannot deduce how one should behave from the laws of physics. But one could hope that the logical thought that physics and mathematics involves would guide one also in one's moral behaviour."

Hawking expressed concern that life on Earth is at risk from a sudden nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus, global warming, an asteroid collision, or other dangers humans have not yet thought of. He feared that "an extremely intelligent future AI will probably develop a drive to survive and acquire more resources as a step toward accomplishing whatever goal it has", and that "the real risk with AI isn't malice, but competence. A super-intelligent AI will be extremely good at accomplishing its goals, and if those goals aren't aligned with ours, we're in trouble". He also considered that the enormous wealth generated by machines needs to be redistributed to prevent exacerbated economic inequality. In a 2014 interview, he said:

In addition, Hawking stated:

If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn't be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to. Hawking once recorded a video tribute to the Democratic Party candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Al Gore.

Hawking supported universal health care, and maintained that without the NHS, he would not have survived into his 70s. He especially feared privatisation of healthcare in the UK, stating: "The more profit is extracted from the system, the more private monopolies grow and the more expensive healthcare becomes. The NHS must be preserved from commercial interests and protected from those who want to privatise it." Hawking criticized the Conservatives for wanting to privatise the NHS, and for cutting funding to it as a result. He was also in favour of increasing the numbers of doctors and nurses in the NHS. Hawking also supported a universal basic income.

Before the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence from the UK, Hawking was one of two hundred public figures who signed a letter endorsing a vote against independence. Hawking similarly denounced Brexit, the UK's withdrawal from the European Union (EU). He predicted it would weaken the UK's contribution to global scientific efforts; he claimed modern scientific research requires international collaboration, and that freedom of movement within Europe, as is guaranteed to EU citizens, encourages the spread of ideas. Voters decided in favour of withdrawal in a 2016 referendum. Later that year, as pro-Brexit Prime Minister Theresa May honoured Hawking at the Pride of Britain Awards, he told her: "please don't ask me to help with Brexit."

Hawking encouraged action to prevent climate change. Hawking also theorized that climate change could lead Earth "to become like Venus, with a temperature of two hundred and fifty degrees , and raining sulphuric acid".

Furthermore, Hawking supported nuclear disarmament and stem cell research. In the 2010s, Hawking accused then-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care Jeremy Hunt of cherry picking evidence to support debased scientific claims.

Disability Hawking had a rare early-onset, slow-progressing form of MND, which gradually paralysed him over decades. Hawking continued to use this type of chair until the early 1990s, at which time his ability to use his hands to drive a wheelchair deteriorated. Hawking used a variety of different chairs from that time, including a DragonMobility Dragon elevating powerchair from 2007; a Permobil C350 from 2014; and then a Permobil F3 from 2016.

Hawking's speech deteriorated, and by the late 1970s he could be understood by only his family and closest friends. To communicate with others, someone who knew him well would interpret his speech into intelligible speech. Spurred by a dispute with the university over who would pay for the ramp needed for him to enter his workplace, Hawking and his wife campaigned for improved access and support for those with disabilities in Cambridge, including adapted student housing at the university. In general, Hawking had ambivalent feelings about his role as a disability rights champion: while wanting to help others, he also sought to detach himself from his illness and its challenges. His lack of engagement in this area led to some critics saying he was not doing enough, although White and Gribbin noted: "just by staying alive and continuing to work at the intense rate he and the world have grown used to, he is an inspiration to handicapped people everywhere".

During a visit to CERN on the border of France and Switzerland in mid-1985, Hawking contracted pneumonia, which in his condition was life-threatening; he was so ill that Jane was asked if life support should be terminated. She refused, but the consequence was a tracheotomy, which required round-the-clock nursing care and caused the loss of what remained of his speech. The NHS was ready to pay for a nursing home, but Jane was determined that he would live at home. The cost of the care was funded by an American foundation. Nurses were hired for the three shifts required to provide the round-the-clock support he required. One of those employed was Elaine Mason, who was to become Hawking's second wife.

For his communication, Hawking initially raised his eyebrows to choose letters on a spelling card, but in 1986 he received a computer program called the "Equalizer" from Walter Woltosz, CEO of Words Plus, who had developed an earlier version of the software to help his mother-in-law, who also had ALS and had lost her ability to speak and write. At the time, the date of Hawking's trip to space was projected to be as early as 2009, but commercial flights to space did not commence before his death.

Mention in Jeffrey Epstein email

Hawking was mentioned in court documents released in 2024 as part of the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British child sex trafficker who conspired with American financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019 ; in 2015, Epstein sent an email to friends of Virginia Giuffre, Epstein's alleged victim, asking them to disprove supposed allegations of Giuffre's that Hawking participated in an "underage orgy" in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein lived. Epstein said he "can issue a reward” to them if they can "prove her allegations are false". The email implies it was written in response to a "new version" of the claim regarding Hawking. Neither Giuffre, who died in 2025, nor anyone else has ever publicly accused Hawking of sexual misconduct. According to physicist Lisa Randall—who was found in 2026 to have corresponded with Epstein—in 2006, Hawking and Epstein were both present at a conference on gravity. Randall describes both her correspondence and Epstein's appearance at the conference as resulting from Epstein's public financing of scientific efforts.

Death Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, at the age of 76. He was eulogised by figures in science, entertainment, politics, and other fields. The flag of Gonville and Caius College flew at half-mast, and a book of condolences was signed by students and visitors there. On 18 March, at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Paralympics in South Korea, International Paralympic Committee president Andrew Parsons gave a tribute to Hawking.

His private funeral took place on 31 March, at Great St Mary's Church in Cambridge. The guests included actors Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, who played Stephen and Jane Hawking in The Theory of Everything; Queen guitarist and astrophysicist Brian May, and actress and model Lily Cole, Stephen's friend. In addition, actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who played Hawking in the film Hawking (2004), astronaut Tim Peake, astrophysicist and Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, and astrophysicist Kip Thorne provided readings. Although Hawking was an atheist, the funeral took place with a traditional Anglican service. thumb Following the cremation, a service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Abbey on 15 June 2018, after which his ashes were interred in the Abbey's nave, between the graves of scientists Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. Inscribed on his memorial stone are the words: "Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking 1942–2018" and an equation describing the temperature of Hawking radiation emitted by black holes.

He had directed that the equation be his epitaph at least fifteen years before his death.

In June 2018, it was announced that a speech of Hawking's, set to music by composer Vangelis, would be beamed into space from a European Space Agency satellite dish in Spain in the direction of A0620-00, one of the nearest known black holes to Earth.

On 8 November 2018, an auction of 22 personal possessions of Hawking, including his wheelchair and his document for Properties of Expanding Universes, took place, and fetched about £1.8 million. Proceeds from the auction sale of the wheelchair went to two charities, the Motor Neurone Disease Association and the Stephen Hawking Foundation; proceeds from the other items went to his estate. in honour of Hawking. The same month, Hawking's nurse, Patricia Dowdy, was struck off the nursing register for "failures over his care and financial misconduct".

In May 2021, it was announced that an Acceptance-in-Lieu agreement between HM Revenue and Customs, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Cambridge University Library, Science Museum Group, and the Hawking Estate, would see around 10,000 pages of Hawking's scientific and other papers remain in Cambridge, while objects including his wheelchairs, speech synthesisers, and personal memorabilia from his former Cambridge office would be housed at the Science Museum in London. In February 2022, the "Stephen Hawking at Work" display opened at the Science Museum as the start of a two-year nationwide tour. In October 2024, the Hawking Building of the Science and Innovation Park in Swindon, England was opened to the public. The building holds about 80% of the Science Museum Group's object collection.

Media depictions

Hawking played a holographic simulation of himself in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993. Hawking also guest-starred in the sitcoms Futurama and The Big Bang Theory. Hawking was featured at the Monty Python Live (Mostly) show in 2014, shown in a pre-recorded video singing Monty Python's "Galaxy Song" and Brian Cox with his wheelchair.

Hawking advertised multiple products, including a wheelchair brand, National Savings,

In 2022, Google featured Hawking in a Google Doodle on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Awards and honours Hawking received numerous awards and honours. Already early in the list, in 1974 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). the American Philosophical Society (1984), and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1992). He was awarded Honorary membership in 1992, of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. In the 1989 Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH). thumb U.S. president Barack Obama and Hawking in the White House in 2009, when Hawking received the Presidential Medal of Freedom In 1981, Hawking was awarded the American Franklin Medal, and in the 1982 New Year Honours, appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). He then received five more honorary degrees, the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1985), the Paul Dirac Medal (1987) and, jointly with Penrose, the prestigious Wolf Prize (1988). In 1986, he was appointed an Academician at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He reportedly declined a knighthood in the late 1990s in objection to the UK's science funding policy. In 2002, following a UK-wide vote, the BBC included Hawking in their list of the 100 Greatest Britons. He was awarded the Copley Medal from the Royal Society (2006),

Hawking received the 2015 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences shared with Viatcheslav Mukhanov for discovering that the galaxies were formed from quantum fluctuations in the early Universe. At the 2016 Pride of Britain Awards, Hawking received the lifetime achievement award "for his contribution to science and British culture".

The Hawking Fellowship

In 2017, the Cambridge Union Society, in conjunction with Hawking, established the Professor Stephen Hawking Fellowship. The fellowship is awarded annually to an individual who has made an exceptional contribution to the STEM fields and social discourse, with a particular focus on impacts affecting the younger generations. Each fellow delivers a lecture on a topic of their choosing, known as the "Hawking Lecture".

Hawking himself accepted the inaugural fellowship, and he delivered the first Hawking Lecture in his last public appearance before his death.

Medal for Science Communication

Hawking was a member of the advisory board of the Starmus Festival, and had a major role in acknowledging and promoting science communication. The Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication is an annual award initiated in 2016 to honour members of the arts community for contributions that help build awareness of science. Recipients receive a medal bearing a portrait of Hawking by Alexei Leonov, and the other side represents an image of Leonov himself performing the first spacewalk along with an image of the "Red Special", the guitar of Brian May (with music being another major component of the Starmus Festival).

The Starmus III Festival in 2016 was a tribute to Stephen Hawking and the book of all Starmus III lectures, "Beyond the Horizon", was also dedicated to him. The first recipients of the medals, which were awarded at the festival, were chosen by Hawking himself: composer Hans Zimmer, physicist Jim Al-Khalili, and the science documentary film Particle Fever (2013).

Publications Popular books A Brief History of Time (1988) My Brief History (2013)

Co-authored The Nature of Space and Time (with Roger Penrose) (1996) The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Roger Penrose, Abner Shimony and Nancy Cartwright) (1997) The Future of Spacetime (with Kip Thorne, Igor Novikov, Timothy Ferris and introduction by Alan Lightman, Richard H. Price) (2002) A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow) (2005)