On June 15, 2018, in London, England, the memorial service and burial ceremony of the late British scientist Hawking was held at Westminster Abbey in London. (Visual China/Photo)
Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford, England, on 8 January 1942, the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. Such a coincidence added a legendary color to Hawking's life.
Hawking once wrote in his posthumous work, "Ten Questions: Hawking's Meditations": "Don't forget that about 200,000 babies were born on this day, and we don't know if any other children grew up to become physicists or astronomers." However, in an article by astronomer Lin Chao recalling Hawking, he mentioned that when he helped Hawking use a telescope to observe Saturn's rings, Hawking proudly told him that Galileo was the first person in the world to see Saturn's rings, and that he was born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death.
Hawking passed away on March 14, 2018, marking the 139th anniversary of Einstein's birth. Hawking's life began with a coincidence and ended with a coincidence. January 8, 2022, the 80th anniversary of Hawking's birth. Although this "king of the universe" has left us, he fought against fate with amazing will, and eventually changed our understanding of the universe and ourselves like Einstein and Galileo.
Exploring space
Hawking's parents originally lived in London, and temporarily lived in Oxford to avoid the German bombing of London. Hawking returned to London after his birth in Oxford. However, due to the radical and improper teaching methods of his school, he did not learn to read until he was 8 years old. He then attended St Albans School. In the British education system at that time, students were divided into three groups: A, B and C, and only students in group A could hope to pursue academic work in the future. Hawking was placed in Group A when he enrolled, but a year later, students after the 20th place in the class were relegated to Group B. Hawking ranked 24th and 23rd in his class in the first 2 semesters of his first year, but in his final semester he was admitted to 18th place and was fortunate not to be relegated (schools in the UK have 3 semesters per academic year). In fact, Hawking was never in the top half of the class. But I don't know if the students saw what the clues were or just out of indifference, giving him a nickname of "Einstein" for his mediocre grades.
Although Hawking did not excel in secondary school, he was able to study at Oxford University and received a scholarship. In 1962, near graduation, he did not perform well in the exam room the night before the exam because he was nervous and did not sleep well. Hawking's test scores are between first-class and second-class degrees, and an interview is required to determine the final result. When asked by the examiner about his future plans, Hawking said he wanted to do research, and if it was a first-class degree, he would go to Cambridge to continue his studies, and if it was second-class, he would stay in Oxford. Eventually, the examiners gave him a first-class degree, and he went to Cambridge University to pursue a doctorate.
In Cambridge, he had wanted to study for a PhD with the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle, but Hoyle's students were already full, so he was assigned to Dennis Sciama. Siama was a student of the famous physicist Paul Dirac, and although Hawking had never heard of him before, he was later thankful for it. Because Hoyle was the founder and defender of a steady-state theory that described the nature of the universe, this theory was later lost because it could not describe the observed results. Hawking argues that if he had attended Hoyle's Ph.D., he would need to defend steady-state theory.
Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) at the age of 21, which amounted to the death sentence of a doctor, and he was very depressed about this and spent all day drinking to dispel his sorrows. But when he meets his later first wife, Jane Wilde (renamed Jane Hawking after marriage), love gives him the strength to live again. His physical condition did not deteriorate as quickly as the doctor expected, so he and Jane talked about marriage, and the two began to plan their future married life. Marriage requires a steady income, and a ph.D. is a prerequisite, so Hawking plucked up the courage to re-engage in research and successfully get a Ph.D.
Early in his career, Hawking keenly discovered in his choice of future research directions that, although general relativity was snubbed at the time, it provided a lot of room to display his talents, and the black hole that sounded strange in it caught his eye. In a 1939 paper, Einstein tried to argue that stars could not collapse under their own gravitational pull, but by the time Hawking began his research, scientists believed in the existence of such exotic objects.
In 1972, Hawking discovered the area theorem, revealing the connection between the event horizon area of a black hole and entropy in thermodynamics. In 1974, as his thinking about black holes deepened, Hawking discovered that black holes were not "black" but could radiate particles, even if nothing should theoretically escape from the black hole. This was the "Hawking radiation" that henceforth named after him.
In the present and visible future, we may not be able to detect the faint signals of Hawking's predictions, and the Nobel Prize is awarded only to those theories and related experiments that have been verified, so Hawking has not won the Nobel Prize like his friend Kip Thorne. The Science Breakthrough Award was once awarded to Hawking as a "special prize" because the prize was more focused on asking a groundbreaking question than just to those who gave the answer. In addition, Hawking has won important awards such as the Dirac Prize and the Wolf Prize, and has served as the prestigious Lucas Chair Professor of Mathematics for 30 years.
Stephen Hawking (July 22, 1999). (Visual China/Photo)
Influence the world
Although the physical disability brought unimaginable difficulties to Hawking's life and work, he faced misfortune with tenacious will, and in addition to his outstanding achievements in physics research, he also had a huge impact on the public and contemporary culture by creating popular science books.
In 1973, Hawking co-authored the Large-Scale Structure of Space-Time with George Ellis, published by Cambridge University Press, his first book. But hawking's influence was still limited to academic circles, and the public knew almost nothing about him. His real public eye began in the 1980s.
In 1982, Hawking came up with the idea of writing popular books. He has mentioned that part of the motivation for writing the book was to prepare tuition for his daughter who is in secondary school, but in addition to financial considerations, he also wants the public to know "how far we have understood the universe" He originally proposed the title of the book, From the Big Bang to the Black Hole: A Short History of Time, but the book's editor, Peter Gutzady, changed the title and changed the "short history" to "brief history." This was later A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to the Black Hole (what we usually call a Brief History of Time). On April 1, 1988, the book was officially published on April Fool's Day after some twists and turns.
By the time of the publication of A Brief History of Time, Hawking had already made his major achievements in the study of black holes and begun to dabble in cosmology, so the book covered most of the topics covered in his subsequent works, including time and space, the origin of the universe, the nature of black holes, and so on. After the book was published, it was translated into dozens of languages, sold tens of millions of copies around the world, and became a phenomenon-level work, for example, the Chinese edition has long occupied the top of the domestic popular science book sales list.
While Hawking doesn't think anyone expected A Brief History of Time to sell so well at the time, he did expect the book to sell. He wanted to write a book that he could buy at the airport at the beginning of his work, so in the process of choosing a publishing house, he did not choose the more academic Cambridge University Press, which he had worked with (in contrast, the Cambridge University Press's offer was much lower), but chose the short-legged chicken press, which was more experienced and much more expensive to publish popular books. He initially used more academic language, but then spent 4 years rewriting the book at the suggestion of Gucciardi to make it (as understandable as possible) and avoid setting too high a threshold for laymen.
After A Brief History of Time, Hawking has published a number of books, the more representative of which are "The Universe in the Fruit Shell" published in 2001 and his "Big Design" co-authored by Leonard Mlodinow, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in 2010. In addition to these well-known works from Chinese readers, Hawking's work includes the collection of essays Black Holes, The Baby Universe, and Others, as well as three of his selected works: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2002), God Makes Integers: A Mathematical Breakthrough That Changed History (2005), and Materials of Dreams: The Most Shocking Quantum Physics Papers and How They Shook the World of Science (2011). At the same time, Hawking and his daughter Lucy Hawking also created a set of children's books featuring "George".
At the time of Hawking's death, The Ten Questions: Hawking's Meditations had not yet been completed. His family and collaborators worked together to complete the final version. The posthumous work was officially published on October 16, 2018. From the ten questions raised in this book, we can see that hawking spent a lot of time in the last moments of his life, in addition to continuing to focus on black holes, space-time and the universe, he also devoted a lot of space to other scientific topics, including gene editing, artificial intelligence, and space migration. Compared with the challenges brought by the development of science and technology to the future of mankind, Hawking believes that climate change and nuclear war are more direct and terrible threats to mankind.
In 2017, the British magazine Nature published a book review. The article believes that although "A Brief History of Time" is not unprecedented, it has greatly enhanced the status of science in the cultural world and changed the pattern of popular science writing. In addition to book publishing, Hawking's image also appeared widely in other aspects of the cultural field. He worked on the films Star Trek and the American drama The Big Bang Theory, and the Simpsons featured his comic book image. Actor Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar for Best Actor for playing Hawking in his biopic The Theory of Everything. The German composer Rolf Riehm was once inspired by a photograph of Hawking under the stars to compose a poem called Hawking. In Lem's view, Hawking is "a metaphor for ever-expanding limitations."
Love is life
Hawking and his collaborators did a lot of important work together. In the field of science, he and Nobel laureate Roger Penrose conducted in-depth theoretical research on black holes, while in the field of public-facing, Leonard Monlordino was one of his most important collaborators. Before collaborating on "Big Design", the two also collaborated to complete the "Brief History of Time (Popular Edition)" based on "A Brief History of Time".
In more than ten years of cooperation, the two have established a deep friendship. After Hawking's death, Monlodino recalled his collaboration with Hawking and created Stephen Hawking: Memories of Friendship and Physics (hereinafter referred to as "Memories"). The English version of the book was published in 2020, and the Chinese edition will be available at the end of 2021. Hawking chose Monlodino as a collaborator because Monlodino had previously created several excellent popular science books, and his writing style was loved by Hawking, and as a professor of physics, he had a deep understanding of physics and could understand the content of Hawking's research. In Memories, Monlodino makes the most of these strengths, documenting the exploration of the universe and the love of life of the world's most influential scientists of this era.
Hawking once wrote a short autobiography, A Brief History of Me, which is his only autobiography. In addition, although various Hawking biographies emerge in an endless stream, most of the authors' creations are based on the collection and processing of materials, and there are not many works that really enter Hawking and face Hawking. In addition to his own knowledge of Hawking, Monrodino interviewed 15 hawking's close friends, nurses and colleagues in order to create "Memories". Therefore, the publication of "Memories" is of great significance for us to understand a more three-dimensional and vivid Hawking.
In "Memories", Monrodino unfolds with three intersecting clues: one main line is his interaction with Hawking, including their experience of co-creation and his observations of Hawking's daily life; one is Hawking's life course, including Hawking's growth, marriage, family, and especially Hawking's research work; the other sub-line provides a more grand background, accounting for the exploration of the deep physical laws of the universe in the past hundred years since Einstein.
In this "Memory", Monlodino's most inked was his experience of co-creating "The Big Design" with Hawking, which gave him the opportunity to observe Hawking's life for a long time and communicate directly. From Munrodino's writings, we can see a hawking who is sometimes funny and humorous, sometimes stubborn and stubborn. As he spends more time with Hawking, Monlodino begins to understand these qualities in Hawking: it is humor that provides Hawking with the optimistic power to face illness, and it is stubbornness that helps Hawking never be discouraged when challenging physical problems.
Many of us might imagine whether Hawking would have achieved more without being physically bound. Monlodino also wanted to understand the issue and had a conversation with Hawking about it. He asked Hawking, "If you didn't have a disability, would you be able to achieve more in physics?" Hawking's response was: "Physical disability has also helped my research." It allows me to concentrate on one thing. Another time, Hawking told Monlodino that being terminally ill had led him to discover something new, and that death had inspired him to cherish every day he lived.
Hawking saw positive forces in his unfortunate experience, so that although his body was bound by a wheelchair and his expression could only be expressed through electronic computers and speech synthesizers, his thoughts could still run through his brain to think about the laws that governed the fate of the universe. "The Universe in the Shell" is Hawking's representative work, the title of the book comes from Shakespeare's famous play "Hamlet". Hamlet says in the play that even if he is locked in a fruit shell, he still thinks he is the king of infinite space. This sentence is also a true portrayal of Hawking's life.
But Hawking fought the disease with so much courage and perseverance that he devoted decades to physics research that physics was not the absolute center of his life. When Monlodino said, "For you, physics is life," Hawking disagreed, correcting: "Love is life." In another conversation between Monlodino and Hawking, Monlodino asked Hawking which of his many discoveries, achievements, and creations he was most satisfied with. Hawking replied, "My children." ”
Monlodino also mentions in the book that Hawking insists on boating the River of Swords with him, even though it is a very dangerous thing for Hawking's body. From this, Monlodino realized that Hawking cared not only about the work he loved, but also about the people close to him and the natural world around him; nature had deeply influenced Hawking, and looking up at the stars had an unusual meaning for him.
Hawking has been exploring the secrets of the starry sky all his life, and in the hearts of all people, he is also closely associated with the starry sky. At the end of his book Memories, Monrodino writes that Hawking's death left a black hole in the lives of all his friends. We never see Hawking again, but his power, like a black hole, always affects our space-time. Eddie Redmayne blessed Hawking this way after hawking's death: "I want Stephen to have fun in the bright starry sky. ”
Eighty years ago, a boy was born in Oxford, and since then he has profoundly changed the course of our understanding of the universe, prompting us to rethink the power that human beings can have on their own. After his death, he was buried in Westminster Abbey in London, between Newton and Darwin. On the memorial tile that belonged to him is inscribed his name, the year of his birth and death, and the equations named after him. This immortal "King of the Universe" is always with the stars.
Southern Weekend contributed to Ju Qiang