The 1960s ended with Hawking being forced to make a concession to his physical condition. After a great deal of persuasion from Jane and a number of close friends, he decided to abandon his crutches and take to a wheelchair. To those who had watched his gradual physical decline, this was seen as a major step and viewed with sadness. Hawking, however, refused to let it get him down. Although the acceptance of a wheelchair was a physical acknowledgment of his affliction, at the same time he gave it not the slightest emotional or mental endorsement. In every other way, life went on as usual. And he could not deny that it did enable him to get around more easily. Never giving in to the symptoms of ALS more than he is physically compelled to is all part of the Stephen Hawking approach to life. As Jane said, “Stephen doesn’t make any concessions to his illness, and I don’t make any concessions to him.”1 That seems to be the way he has survived against all the odds for so many years and also how Jane managed to remain sane living with him.
Earlier, in 1968, Hawking had been invited to become a staff member at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy housed in a modern building on the outskirts of Cambridge. Originally Fred Hoyle had headed it, but he resigned his post in 1972 after a final blazing row with the Cambridge establishment. This time the dispute was over the administration of British science in general and Cambridge science in particular. When Hoyle left, the institute was merged with the Cambridge Observatories and came under the control of Professor Donald Lynden-Bell. Under his leadership, “Theoretical” was dropped from the name, and it has been the Institute of Astronomy ever since. In the same year, a young radio astronomer, Simon Mitton, was appointed administrative head of the institute. He subsequently worked closely with Hawking during the years he spent there.
Hawking worked at the institute three mornings a week. It was too far from Little St. Mary’s Lane to get to by wheelchair. Instead, he had managed to acquire a three-wheeled invalid car, which he drove out into the suburbs on the main roads. Mitton would meet him at his car and help him out of the little blue vehicle and into the main building. Hawking had his own office, and, as his prestige grew during the following years, a string of eminent astronomers and theoretical physicists was drawn to the institute to confer with him. Mitton describes him as a human magnet in the world of physics. Graduate students as well as professional scientists from all over the world were attracted to the institute mainly because of his presence there.
Hawking was never interested in observational astronomy. While an undergraduate at Oxford, he had attended a vacation course at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, helping Astronomer Royal Sir Richard Woolley to measure the components of double stars. However, so the story goes, upon looking through the telescope and seeing nothing more impressive than a couple of hazy dots in the star field, Hawking was convinced that theoretical physics would be more interesting. To this day, he has looked through a telescope no more than a handful of times. At the Institute of Astronomy, the work Hawking was interested in pursuing was conducted in his head or with pen, paper, and computer.
Mitton recalls that Hawking was not the easiest person to work with. He found him irritable and impatient, and he remembers very little of the famous Hawking wit and humor. Secretaries apparently also found him difficult, and there were many occasions when a newly employed assistant would come to see Mitton on the verge of tears, complaining of over-demanding workloads. Hawking always wanted things done yesterday. At such times, Mitton had to remind himself and the secretaries working for him that such moods were perhaps a symptom of the man’s condition.
Others would disagree. Roger Penrose has pointed out that Hawking displays an unusual cheerfulness and sense of humor in the face of adversity. He has seen Hawking in a bad mood, irritable and impatient with those around him, but he believes that many people with ALS develop a compensation mechanism, a system which acts as an antidepressant. It would perhaps be nearer the mark to say that Hawking’s behavior has more to do with his own character than any effect of his illness. Like the rest of us, he is sometimes short and impatient with those around him, and he does not suffer fools gladly. Because he works at such an intense pace, putting great demands on himself, he expects everyone else to have the same energy and drive. Perhaps he simply didn’t get on with the secretaries at the Institute of Astronomy.
However, the institute seemed to be more aware of his worth than his own college was. The authorities made every effort to assist him in his work and to compensate for his disabilities. They had an automatic phone fitted in his office, preprogrammed to enable him to reach other numbers at the push of a single button. But this was long before digital technology, and the device was really little more than a box of tricks with a vast number of leads and connections sprouting from a junction box in the corner of the room. It took post office engineers over a week to install it.
There was a definite buzz in Cambridge about Hawking and his work, even before he joined the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. He had a certain aura about him. Long before he had made his mark on cosmology, among graduate students there was an air of reverence accompanying the name Stephen Hawking. Such early discipleship illustrates the beginnings of the cult status that has surrounded many of the things Hawking has said and done during his career. Even in the early 1970s, it was possible to see that the image of the crippled genius, so beloved of the media, was beginning to take root in the minds of those on the periphery of Hawking’s life and work. Instead of this image diminishing or fading away as his career has blossomed, with each fresh achievement his status as the new Einstein—the purely cerebral creature trapped inside an inoperative body—has grown.
Mitton recalls that, by the time of their first meeting in 1972, Hawking’s speech had deteriorated considerably. It was essential to concentrate hard on what he was saying in order to understand him. Mitton found that he always had to face Hawking and watch what he was saying as well as listen intently; even then, it was not easy. The best way to communicate, Mitton found, was to ask questions that required only negative or affirmative answers. So instead of asking, “When would you like to go to lunch, Stephen?,” it was far easier to say, “We are going to lunch at 12:30. Is that all right?” Fischer Dilke, who wrote and directed one of the first television documentaries about Hawking, disagrees. He says that Hawking hates nothing more than being asked such questions, because it is a sign to him that the person he is talking to is not treating him in a normal way. It obliges him to answer only “Yes” or “No,” and he would, quite naturally, like to be engaged in a standard conversation.
In retrospect, the seventies may be viewed as something of a gray decade. After the optimism and hope of the sixties, the West, with the possible exception of West Germany, was thrown into recession; only in Japan did a combination of postwar determination, a flair for the commercial application of Western technology, and sheer hard work set the pattern for industrial growth. Britain’s economy nearly foundered, hammered by a series of disastrous strikes and political turmoil. The decade began with a Labor government, which lasted until June of 1970 when Edward Heath narrowly beat Harold Wilson in a surprise victory, and ended with a new style of Tory government in the shape of the country’s first female prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.
In April 1970, the world held its breath as the drama of Apollo 13 was enacted hundreds of thousands of miles out in space, and the crippled spaceship limped home to safety. In September, high drama of a different kind was played out in the Jordanian desert when Middle Eastern terrorists blew up three jet airliners. The world lost a charismatic and influential figure in the shape of Hawking’s schoolboy hero, Bertrand Russell, who died at the age of ninety-seven. And it was in that year that Stephen Hawking began to turn his attention toward the exotic astronomical objects recently dubbed “black holes” and once again found himself in collaboration with the mathematician Roger Penrose.
It is often the case with scientific discovery that a crucial step forward comes through inspiration at an unexpected moment, and Hawking is fond of recalling the story of when his first black hole breakthrough came to him. Soon after the birth of his second child, Lucy, in November 1970, he was thinking about black holes as he got ready for bed one night. As he says:
My disability makes this rather a slow process, so I had plenty of time. Suddenly, I realized that many of the techniques that Penrose and I had developed to prove singularities could be applied to black holes.2
At that time, notions of what a black hole was really like were pretty hazy, and both Penrose and Hawking had been trying to come up with some way of stating which points in spacetime were inside a black hole and which were outside. It was just as he was about to get into bed one night that an obvious solution struck him. The answer to the problem was actually one that he claims Penrose had originally suggested but had not applied to the situation they were studying. The science is described in the next chapter; suffice it to say that the resolution was so exciting that Hawking got very little sleep that night. Early the next morning, he was on the phone to Penrose.
For the next two years (as we describe more fully in Chapter 9), the pair of them developed their ideas about the physics of black holes. As they worked, they came to see that the way they had originally perceived black-hole physics was not as clear-cut as it ought to be. To properly get to grips with it required them to dust away the mental cobwebs of dimly remembered physical concepts they had not thought about since undergraduate days. In particular, Hawking was gaining a renewed interest in a field called thermodynamics, developed by Lord Kelvin and others in the nineteenth century.
No one would have imagined that thermodynamics had any relevance to black holes at all. As Dennis Overbye has put it, “It was as if he had popped the hood on a Ferrari and found an antique steam engine chugging away inside.”3 It was ridiculous—thermodynamics was used to study gases under pressure, heat transfer, and the efficiency of steam engines, not such exotic objects as black holes. Little did Hawking realize at the time that thermodynamics was to have a huge influence on the future of black-hole theory and would shortly lead him into his second major scientific confrontation with another physicist.
By early 1973, Hawking and Penrose were beginning to use thermodynamics as an analogy for what was happening in a black hole. Scientists often do this: an everyday model helps them to understand situations as bizarre as those found in a singularity. However, a young researcher named Jacob Bekenstein, working at Princeton University, was taking things a lot further. He was not content to use thermodynamics as an analogy, but instead was applying its precepts literally. And he was coming up with some very interesting results.
When Hawking discovered Bekenstein’s work, he was incensed. He had been using thermodynamics as nothing more than a model for what was going on and believed it totally ridiculous to take it further and actually apply it to black holes. Together with his old friend from Cambridge, Brandon Carter, and the American relativist James Bardeen, he published a paper in the scientific journal Communications in Mathematical Physics that attempted to disclaim the suggestion. The argument raged in the scientific press and across the Atlantic for many months. Hawking was becoming more and more irritated by what he saw as Bekenstein’s absurd notions. In reply to a paper that Bekenstein published, Hawking, Carter, and Bardeen responded with their own, titled “The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanics.” Both papers were later shown to be incomplete.
Most physicists sided with Hawking and his coauthors, but Bekenstein was not put off by the massed ranks of the scientific community ranged against him. Years later, he said of the confrontation:
In those days in 1973 when I was often told that I was headed the wrong way, I drew some comfort from Wheeler’s opinion that “black hole thermodynamics is crazy, perhaps crazy enough to work.”4
Hawking continued to think that Bekenstein’s notion was simply crazy—at least for a while. What brought about the change was a series of events that would lead him to a far more important conclusion about black holes and propel him to the forefront of theoretical physics. But that was half a year away, and in the intervening period the arguments continued.
Meanwhile, Hawking was finding the mathematics of the work increasingly difficult to deal with. The equations for interpreting the physics of black holes are amazingly complex, and by this stage of his illness he could use neither paper and pen nor a typewriter. Instead, he was forced to develop techniques for keeping such information in his mind and ways of manipulating equations without being able to write them down. Such a feat has been described by one of Hawking’s friends and collaborators, Werner Israel:
[The] achievement is as though Mozart had composed and carried an entire symphony in his head—anyone who saw the lines of complex mathematics covering the blackboard like musical staves at a recent seminar would have appreciated the comparison.5
Hawking has the great advantage of possessing a superb memory. In his book Beyond the Black Hole: Stephen Hawking’s Universe, John Boslough recounts an incident that demonstrates Hawking’s ability to retain detailed information in his head:
One of Hawking’s students told me that, while driving him to London for a physics conference once, Hawking remembered the page number of a minor error he had read in a book years before.6
Another anecdote describes how a secretary who worked for Hawking was amazed when he had once recalled, twenty-four hours later, a tiny mistake he had made while dictating—from memory—forty pages of equations. Hawking is not unique in having this talent. In 1983, he dazzled students at a Caltech (California Institute of Technology) seminar when he dictated a forty-term version of an important equation from memory. As his assistant finished writing the last term, his colleague, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, who happened to be sitting in on the talk, stood up and declared that Hawking had omitted a term. Gell-Mann was also working from memory.
Despite his disabilities, by the early 1970s Hawking was beginning to travel extensively. His status as a physicist had grown with his work in collaboration with Penrose, and he was frequently invited to deliver talks and address seminars around the world. At the same time as his scientific reputation was building, Hawking’s image as a determined fighter, who would go to any extreme to be treated as a normal human being, was spreading far beyond Cambridge.
One of his oldest and closest friends, the late David Schramm, of the University of Chicago, had a wealth of anecdotes about Stephen’s exploits. His favorite recollection from the early seventies concerns the occasion when he first became aware of Stephen’s huge potential for enjoying himself. After a conference in New York, Schramm took the Hawkings to a party thrown by a friend in Greenwich Village. Stephen really enjoyed himself, dancing with Jane, spinning his wheelchair around the room, and generally having a great time.
Schramm is also happy to dub his friend an incorrigible flirt and to describe his eyes as tremendously expressive. Women, Schramm claims, were always very interested in Stephen long before his international fame brought him wide attention. Indeed, David Schramm’s wife, Judy, was tremendously taken by him when they first met and found his ability to convey his personality by facial expression extremely attractive.
Hawking’s interest in dancing has never diminished, and the annual college parties at Caius would not have been the same without his joining in with the other fellows and their partners on the dance floor. Nowadays, in his elevated position as professor and head of the DAMTP, he is still to be seen at Christmas discos organized by the students, dancing the night away. His energy, both at work and at play, has become a legend. As David Schramm said, Stephen is a real party animal.
Between trips abroad and working on black holes with Roger Penrose, Hawking was collaborating with George Ellis on a book eventually to be called The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime. The idea for the book had arisen back in 1965, when Hawking was still working toward the completion of his Ph.D. Ellis remembers that the two of them had drawn up a list of future plans, which included “getting married” and “writing a cosmology book together.” Because both of them were busy with other projects and domestic changes, work on the manuscript went very slowly. Ellis spent some time in Hamburg and then in Boston, and the two of them began to see each other less frequently. Through Dennis Sciama, they managed to secure a contract with Cambridge University Press, which was just starting a series of high-level research monographs aimed at professional physicists.
It took six years to finish the manuscript. They divided up the various topics between them and worked independently, meeting when they could to go through each other’s contributions and make changes where appropriate. Ellis did all the typing; when Hawking could no longer write, he dictated his material to Ellis, who wrote it up for him. George Ellis was one of Hawking’s close associates who could understand his speech, but even he found it difficult at times. He soon discovered that it was much easier to follow what Hawking was saying in discussions about scientific matters, when the conversation consisted largely of familiar technical terms. It was in everyday conversations, which could be about almost anything, that the going got tough.
Because The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime took so long to write, events overtook it in a number of areas. In particular, Hawking’s own work on black holes (with which Ellis was not directly involved) had progressed faster than they could amend the text. The book dealt purely with classical theories of cosmology, but by the time of its publication in 1973, Hawking had made great strides in the quantum interpretation of black-hole physics, and it was not until it went into a second edition that they were able to update the text. The book caused quite a stir in academic circles and did a great deal for the general prestige of the series. Indeed, Hawking is now considered by Cambridge University Press to be the most distinguished author in its catalog.
The book is incredibly complex, completely unreadable except by experts working in the field of cosmology. Hawking and Ellis had no intention of writing a popular book, and their manuscript fit the requirements perfectly. However, a favorite story in the science department at Cambridge University Press recounts an occasion when an associate of Hawking’s ventured his opinion of this first publication. Hawking and Simon Mitton were returning to Cambridge from a meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society in London and happened to be sharing a railway carriage with the radio astronomer John Shakeshaft. As they pulled out of the station, Shakeshaft, who was sitting in the seat opposite Hawking, leaned forward and said, “Well, I got a copy of your book, Steve.”
“Oh, did you enjoy it?” asked Hawking.
“Well,” Shakeshaft replied, “I thought I might make it to page 10, but I only got as far as page 4, and I’ve given up, I’m afraid!” Despite the complexity of the book, the latest sales figures show that, since its publication, it has notched up 3,500 copies in hardback and over 20,000 in paperback—one of the best-selling research monographs ever published by Cambridge University Press.
Simon Mitton, who left the Institute of Astronomy in 1977, is now the science director at Cambridge University Press. He has suggested that the book has sold to a large number of undergraduates who bought it because it looks good on their bookshelves but have probably never gotten beyond the second page of tightly packed equations. The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime and other, later, technical books of Hawking’s showed a definite upturn in their sales curves upon the publication, many years later, of A Brief History of Time. After that, the original coauthor’s name, “S. W. Hawking,” printed on the jacket was hurriedly changed to “Stephen Hawking,” and the sales figures took another climb.
In the world of black-hole research, work was moving forward at a startling pace, and Hawking was in the vanguard. It was becoming more and more clear to him that the purely classical interpretation of black holes was deficient. In September 1973 he visited Moscow. The head of the Institute for Physical Problems of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Moscow was a fiery little man with a bald head and boundless energy named Yakov Boris Zel’dovich. He and his team had been working on black holes, in particular on the way in which they interacted with light. Hawking returned to Cambridge convinced that they were on to something but were going about things the wrong way. As he said many years later, “I didn’t like the way they derived their result, so I set out to do it properly.”7
What he then decided to attempt was quite revolutionary. As we saw in Chapter 2, the two great pillars of twentieth-century physics are quantum mechanics and relativity, but they are at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as physics is concerned. They speak a different language, and nobody had managed to reconcile the two theories. But this was exactly what Hawking had set his sights on. It seemed to be the only way forward if he were to explain the behavior of black holes thrown up by the contradictory ideas of Bekenstein on the one hand and of himself and Penrose on the other.
Sorting out the problem was easier said than done. Working on the equations in his head was difficult enough, but after months of intense work Hawking kept coming up with completely nonsensical results. According to the equations, black holes appeared to be emitting radiation. He, and everyone else at the time, believed this to be impossible. He was still convinced that he was really on to something but took the conscious decision not to discuss the problem with anyone until he had settled the matter one way or another.
Christmas 1973 came and he was still in as much of a mess with the mathematics as he had ever been. He decided to rework the equations. He knew that he had cut corners with some of the derivations and believed that these shortcuts may have held the key to the problem. During the Christmas vacation, he spent lonely weeks running and rerunning the equations through his mind, forcing himself to use ever more complex processes to eradicate the annoying anomalies. Finally, in January 1974 he took the plunge and confided in Dennis Sciama, who was organizing a conference at the time. To Hawking’s surprise, Sciama was very excited by the idea and, with Hawking’s permission, set about spreading the word.
A few days later, it was Hawking’s thirty-second birthday, and his family arranged a dinner party to celebrate. Soon after the meal was served, the phone rang. It was Roger Penrose calling from London—he had heard the story propagated by Sciama and wanted to know all about it. The discussion went on and on. The food grew cold, and the other guests waited patiently for Hawking to return to the table. Forty-five minutes later, with the meal ruined, he hung up. Penrose was tremendously excited and wanted to discuss it further.
Going against all current ideas about black holes, by the power of mathematical reasoning, Hawking had been forced to the unarguable conclusion that not only did tiny black holes emit radiation, but under certain conditions they could actually explode. By late January, one of his colleagues and friends from postgraduate days, Martin Rees, was convinced that Hawking had made a great discovery. Inspired by his latest discussion with Stephen, he bumped into Dennis Sciama in a corridor at the Institute of Astronomy. “Have you heard?” he said, excitedly. “Stephen’s changed everything!”
Sciama dashed off to see Hawking. By the end of the conversation, he too was convinced and persuaded his former student to announce his results at the conference he was organizing in February at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory outside Oxford.
Hawking was driven to the laboratory through the icy chill of midwinter Oxfordshire and assisted into the building by one of his research students. Sitting patiently to the side of the main group, he listened to the other speakers announcing their latest news. As usual, he asked his customary penetrating questions, trying hard to control his great feeling of excitement. He had a hunch, now supported by a number of his respected colleagues and peers, that he was on to something very big. At last he was wheeled to the front of the lecture theater, and his illustrations were projected onto the back wall while he delivered his talk in the almost unintelligible tones to which his colleagues had become accustomed. His final line was delivered. A stunned hush fell over the entire room. You could have heard a pin drop as the audience of scientists tried to absorb the astonishing news. Then the backlash began.
The moderator of the meeting, the English theorist John G. Taylor, jumped up from his seat and proclaimed that what Hawking had said was complete nonsense. Pausing only to drag one of his colleagues from the seat beside him, Taylor stormed from the room and immediately started writing a paper denouncing Hawking’s claim. Hawking had expected a reaction, but nothing like this. He simply sat at the podium in shocked silence.
John Taylor’s paper was dashed off and sent to the scientific journal Nature for publication. The editor of Nature sent the draft manuscript to Hawking for his comments before making the decision to publish it. Hawking wrote back to recommend publication. He would not want to stand in the way of anyone rash enough to disclaim his work without having investigated the matter thoroughly.
A month after the meeting outside Oxford, Hawking published in Nature his own paper describing the newly discovered phenomena. Within weeks, physicists all over the world were discussing his work, and it became the hot topic of conversation in every physics laboratory from Sydney to South Carolina. Some physicists went so far as to say that the new findings constituted the most significant development in theoretical physics for years. Dennis Sciama described Hawking’s paper as “one of the most beautiful in the history of physics.” This radiation, which he had discovered could be emitted by certain black holes, was from then on known as Hawking Radiation.
However, not everyone was convinced, and it was quite a while before many groups working around the world came to terms with this revolution in black-hole physics. It took until 1976 for Zel’dovich’s team in Moscow to accept the new ideas. Zel’dovich ran his institute in an extremely dictatorial manner. What he said went. When he finally gave his endorsement to the theory, his team was compelled to go along with it, just as they had followed him when he had disagreed with it.
At the time of Zel’dovich’s change of heart, Roger Penrose was invited to Moscow to give a talk that Zel’dovich, as Penrose’s colleague and head of the institute, would be attending. In his lecture notes, Penrose had assumed the validity of Hawking’s deductions and had built his talk around them. When he arrived, a day before the lecture, he was told bluntly that Zel’dovich did not agree with Hawking, nor did any of his students. Not only that, but he would prefer it if Penrose did not mention Hawking’s findings. Penrose was completely thrown. It meant, quite simply, that he had to rewrite his lecture; he set to work, laboring into the small hours. Then, a few hours before he was due on the podium, an assistant turned up at his hotel to inform him that Zel’dovich had changed his mind about Hawking—and so had all his students.
Another story relates how the American physicist Kip Thorne was in Zel’dovich’s apartment when the transformation in his thinking actually occurred. Zel’dovich was pacing the room when Thorne arrived, and in a theatrical display of resignation the Russian physicist threw up his arms in despair and said, “I give up, I give up. I didn’t believe it, but now I do.”8
The mid-seventies saw the beginnings of a renaissance in the public awareness of science, and the idea of such exotic objects as black holes that could eat whole solar systems for breakfast caught the public imagination. It was at about this time that the name of Stephen Hawking first impinged on the popular awareness. It was also the time when a great deal of hot air was circulated around the serious theories by writers overpopularizing the ideas the physicists were propounding.
Hawking himself began to pass as a metaphor for his own work. He was becoming the black-hole cosmonaut trapped in a crippled body, piercing the mysteries of the Universe with the mind of a latter-day Einstein, going where even angels feared to tread. With the arrival of black holes in the public consciousness, the mystique that had begun to gather around him in Cambridge at the end of the sixties started to extend beyond the cloistered limits of the physics community. Newspaper articles and TV documentaries about black holes started to appear, and Stephen Hawking began to be seen as the man to talk to.
It was not only the media that were beginning to register what was going on; Hawking’s achievements had also been noticed by the scientific establishment. In March 1974, within weeks of the announcement of Hawking Radiation, he received one of the greatest honors in any scientist’s career. At the tender age of thirty-two, he was invited to become a fellow of the Royal Society, one of the youngest scientists in the society’s long history to be given such an honor.
The investiture took place at the headquarters of the Royal Society, at 6 Carlton House Terrace, a white-colonnaded mansion overlooking St. James’s Park in the West End of London. It is traditional for new fellows of the society to walk to the podium in the large meeting room that dominates the building in order to sign the roll of honor and shake the president’s hand. However, in this case, the president at the time, Nobel Prize-winning biophysicist Sir Alan Hodgkin, brought the membership book down to the front row for Hawking to sign. It took an age for Hawking to sign his own name. The letters were slowly and agonizingly formed on the page alongside the others invested at the same ceremony. As he wrote, the room was completely silent. Then, as he finished the last letter and Hodgkin lifted the book from his lap, the gathered scientists burst into thunderous applause.
The local newspaper, the Cambridge Evening News, reported the great event on the day of Hawking’s investiture, and a party was thrown at the DAMTP after the ceremony in London. Friends, family, and colleagues in the department were all invited to celebrate his achievement. As one of the senior members of the gathering and Hawking’s old supervisor, Dennis Sciama was invited to give an impromptu toast to his most successful student, in which he paid tribute to Hawking’s achievements and raised his glass to future successes.
As his friends and family joined Sciama in the toast, Hawking surveyed the room. He had come a long way, he knew that, but this was just the beginning. Although he would always believe his investiture into the Royal Society to be the proudest moment of his career, there were plenty more rungs to climb on the career ladder. And, despite the adversities—or perhaps, as some have suggested, because of them—he would continue to climb. Where his feet could not go, his mind would soar.