To millions of people all over the world, 
Stephen Hawking is the public face of science. Bulan Lahiri talks to the famous scientist about his theories on time, creation, the universe and The Simpsons

On September 30, 2009, Stephen Hawking, renowned cosmologist and celebrity author of A Brief History of Time, vacated the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University’s Centre for Mathematical Sciences after 30 years. The position was once held by Isaac Newton who took over from the first Chair, Isaac Barrow, founder of the mathematical tools of calculus, in 1669. Charles Babbage, father of the computer, and Paul Dirac, Nobel-awardee for discovering antimatter, were other occupants.

Judith Croasdell, Hawking’s personal assistant, is quick to point out that the great man is not retiring but plans to continue as Director of Research.

At 21, Hawking was diagnosed with a motor neuron disease and told that he had only two more years to live. Today, he’s stretched the boundaries: it’s been 46 years of living on “borrowed time”.

The disease (a variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) that has left Hawking paralysed, was first detected when he was a PhD student at Cambridge. As his condition worsened and writing lengthy equations became difficult, he was constrained to move from purely-mathematical studies to cosmology, where he could translate the problems into geometry and visualise them in his head, such as the 11 dimensions of string theory. In 1985, a pneumonia-induced tracheotomy robbed him of his speech, forcing him to communicate the way he now does: using a twitch of his right cheek to move a cursor through his dictionary via an infrared beam, usually completing an entire statement before sending it to a voice synthesizer. It takes him as long as 20 minutes to express a single thought, and whether he is speaking or writing, it is the same laborious and agonisingly slow process.

But none of this appears to have got in the way of his work. Or life. He married fellow Cambridge-student Jane Wilde, fathered three children, divorced 26 years later to marry his nurse Elaine, divorced a second time, probed into the nature of time and the origin of the cosmos, was appointed Lucasian Chair,  and wrote several best-sellers on science for the ordinary person.

A Brief History of Time became a surprise cult-book: a chart-buster for 237 weeks, selling roughly one copy for every 750 persons on earth — even if they didn’t all read it. Time has been a preoccupation for Hawking — both personally and professionally. He has, while confronting his own mortality, spent much of his work-life pondering over time and how it all began, and the space-time dynamic. The book attempted to make complex concepts in cosmology comprehensible to the common man. However, to counter criticism that its contents were way too technical and most people who started on it couldn’t finish, Hawking rehashed and updated the contents in a later version, A Briefer History of Time, in 2005.

But what the book did most of all, apart from making him a millionaire many times over, was to catapult Hawking into the limelight like few other living scientists, turning him virtually into the “face of science” for many. It brought with it television appearances (on Star Trek and The Simpsons) and publicity, fuelling an insatiable curiosity about the man and what makes him tick — spawning myth and legend. The romantic notion of the man — a butterfly mind trapped in a diving bell body — consumes the public imagination enough to make the Hawking Show a never-ending publicity circus.

Many of Hawking’s myriad theories — cosmic origin, unified theory, the big bang and black holes, multiple dimensions, singularities, string theory — are bold and imaginative but border on the edge of testability, making them difficult to prove. This means many scientists view his work with scepticism. Others suspect that once the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) — the world’s largest particle accelerator — being constructed by CERN (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) near Geneva is up and running, some of Hawking’s more famous theories, particularly those that pertain to black holes, may be proven.

He has just completed a two-month trip to the USA where he and 15 other “agents of change” from the world over were awarded America’s highest civilian honour, the Medal of Freedom, by President Obama on August 12. He is planning a trip into orbit with Richard Branson, working on a major television series and all set to take on Time head-on in his interminable quest towards “a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all.”

Stephen Hawking spoke to wknd. about black holes, parallel universes and the Theory of Everything.

Does it bother you that we may never have a satisfactory theory of everything?

Over time, we have managed to construct successful theories of the physical interactions and partially unify them into the so-called standard model. It is natural to hope we can continue this process, and find a completely unified theory of everything. Maybe we won’t succeed, but we should certainly try.

Tell us a little about 
multiverse……

M-theory, our best candidate for the theory of everything, indicates that many different kinds of universes are possible. This is called the multiverse. It explains why the universe is so finely tuned to allow life. Most universes will contain no life, but in the few that do, people will ask: why is the universe so carefully adjusted for life? The answer is that if it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be here.

Do you think there is life elsewhere in the universe?

We know that life exists on Earth. Some people even claim that intelligent life exists on Earth. The early universe contained no life. So if life appeared spontaneously on Earth, it should have also appeared elsewhere. The universe should be full of life.

How significant do you expect the LHC and the experiments at CERN to be in resolving the gaps in our knowledge — between our understanding of the very big, as in the structure of the universe, and the very small, as in quantum physics?

The LHC, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle, the particle that gives mass to all the other particles. Another discovery that we might make is super partners, Partners for all the particles we know, with a spin that is greater or less by half a unit. Their existence would be a key confirmation of string theory, and they could make up the mysterious dark matter that holds galaxies together. Whatever the LHC finds, or fails to find, the results will tell us a lot about the structure of the universe.

The LHC is billed as the largest and most expensive scientific experiment ever built, and the possibility that it will create small black holes cannot be ruled out. Is it likely that it might even bring an end to the planet?

The LHC is absolutely safe. If the collisions in the LHC produced a micro black hole, and this is unlikely, it would just evaporate away again, producing a characteristic pattern of particles. Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the Earth’s atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens. The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on.

Humankind appears to have an insatiable quest to understand things, and the LHC is an example of our willingness to invest in that understanding. But are there any likely practical advances that will come from it in our lifetime?

Throughout history, people have studied pure science from a desire to understand the universe, rather than for practical applications or commercial gain. But their discoveries have later turned out to have great practical benefits. Modern society is based on advances in pure science that were not foreseen to lead to practical applications. It is difficult to see an economic return from research at the LHC, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be any.

If you had to choose, which do you think is more important in advancing our knowledge of the universe — the LHC and the associated work, or the space programme?

That is like asking which of my children I would choose to sacrifice. Both the LHC and the space programme are vital if the human race is not to stultify, and eventually die out. Together they cost less than one tenth of a per cent of world GDP. If the human race can not afford that, it doesn’t deserve the epithet, human.

You’ve joked that if the LHC creates small black holes — albeit rather short-lived ones — it could win you the Nobel prize…

If the LHC were to produce little black holes, I don’t think there’s any doubt I would get a Nobel prize if they showed the properties I predict. However, I think the probability that the LHC has enough energy to create black holes is less than one per cent. I’m not holding my breath.

Your own battle with Motor Neurone Disease has been well documented. What does it mean to you to have lived to see this day?

When my condition was first diagnosed, neither I, nor my doctors, expected me to live another 45 years. My scientific work has helped keep me going.

By the standards of particle physicists, you get a lot of television work: do you enjoy the extra-curricular work? Do you get many other offers that you have to turn down?

Things like The Simpsons are fun and help pay for my carers, but my scientific work is what’s important to me. I never want to retire.

What are you most proud of?

I am very proud that I have been able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. I am also glad that my work has reached a popular audience because I believe it is important that the public should know, and understand, the seemingly mysterious work of scientists. But this universe would be an empty place indeed if I had not had the love and support of my family and friends.

wknd@khaleejtimes.com