In October 1962 a young physics graduate from Oxford arrived at Trinity Hall to begin a PhD in cosmology. He had hoped to study under the famous astronomer Fred Hoyle, but was assigned instead to Dennis Sciama. Within months he would also receive devastating news: at the age of twenty-one, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and told he might not live long enough to finish.
Stephen Hawking finished. His 1966 thesis, on the properties of expanding universes, was the start of more than half a century of work in Cambridge, and he never really left. In 1965 he became a research fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and he remained a Fellow of Caius for the rest of his life.
Black holes are not so black
Much of Hawking’s work was done in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, then housed in old buildings off Silver Street, a short walk from the river. In 1974 he announced one of the most surprising results in modern physics: that black holes are not completely black. Because of quantum effects at their edge, they should glow faintly and slowly lose energy. The idea became known as Hawking radiation, and weeks later he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, aged just 32.
“Look up at the stars, and not down at your feet.”
Stephen Hawking
In 1979 he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, the chair once held by Isaac Newton, and he held it for thirty years. His book A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, carried those ideas far beyond Cambridge, into millions of homes around the world.
The Cambridge he left behind
Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, aged 76. His ashes were laid to rest in Westminster Abbey, near Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. In Cambridge his presence is quieter but everywhere: in the college where he dined for over fifty years, in the department on Wilberforce Road that carries on his work, and in the students who still come here hoping to understand how the universe began.
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