8
The morning after the party I was in an impatient mood. We’d made no concrete progress the day before. We’d sat side-by-side, I staring at Stephen, he staring down at his computer screen, typing out long (for him) commentaries about the book and what he wanted it to say. He was questioning its fundamental thrust. This despite the months we’d spent developing the very concrete plan that we’d agreed upon—and despite the fact that we’d already written five of the eight chapters. I added my two cents now and then, and he replied. We traded ideas, and some were good ones. But why the second-guessing? Was it procrastination, a way to avoid having to write? I thought not. Stephen’s psyche appeared as healthy as ever, but for some reason our book was having a midlife crisis.
We’d agreed that morning to meet at the Athenaeum—the Caltech faculty club—for lunch before going to Stephen’s office. Stephen showed up about a half hour late. Truth is, on this occasion his tardiness was really my fault, for having kept him out so late at my party. But he’d often start later than he’d said he would. I understood that. It took a lot of prep in the mornings to get him ready. Things could drag out. A call would have been nice—to warn me—but such calls never came. He was like the trains running late. You can take it or leave it but you can’t change it. People called it Hawking time.
Locals admire the Athenaeum. Red tile roof, lots of archways, elements of Spanish and Italian villas. Mediterranean revival. The dining room has twenty-foot gilded ceilings with full-height windows, ornate chandeliers, lots of dark wood, and, my favorite, oil paintings of long-dead science greats. The “Ath” is considered a venerable place. But like space-time, what is venerable depends on the observer. Cambridge traced its founding to a 1231 charter from King Henry III. There, even a recent addition would be centuries older than anything at Caltech. So to Stephen, the reverence afforded the Ath must have caused amusement. Then again, Cambridge didn’t have warm sunny winters and ubiquitous wheelchair access.
Though the atmosphere at the Ath couldn’t stand up to that at Caius, the food could, and like an army, Stephen marched on his stomach. Today they served roast beef. That made Stephen feel at home. We were at the tail end of the meal, which meant that everyone but Stephen was already finished.
I was a bit nervous because I’d spent the morning contemplating how the previous day had gone. It had been our first workday since his arrival, and upon reflection I became disturbed by our interaction. It wasn’t just that we were revisiting decisions we’d already made; he also didn’t seem to have done any of the work he’d promised to do—over several months—before coming to Pasadena. Back when I was just starting out and Feynman was dying of cancer, Feynman had told me that examining a relationship, or your life, has its uses, but if you’re happy it’s best to avoid it. But I wasn’t happy, and although I’m not big on relationship talks, I felt I needed to have one with Stephen.
A personal discussion was not something I wanted to engage in at lunch or in the company of others, so I was holding off. Of course, with Stephen you were always in the company of others, or almost always. Here at lunch there were two carers, David and Mary. Mary was the carer on duty. At the office David wouldn’t be with us, and I figured I could wait for Mary to take a bathroom break. I was biding my time, waiting for lunch to be over. But Stephen was eating even more slowly than usual.
“Come on, have another bite,” said Mary.
Stephen curled his mouth downward, no.
“Oh, come on! It’s soooo good. Just open up and have one more. You can do it! You’ve hardly eaten.” She put a hand on his hand and spoken to him with the slow, overenthusiastic cadence you’d use when addressing a baby. Stephen had to be cared for as if he were a baby, but he didn’t have to be spoken to that way. Still, some carers did.
The carers each had their style. They all seemed to love him, but each in their own way. Some were serious matronly types. Others flirted with him. They’d wear tight, low-cut tops, and when they leaned over to adjust something on his person, they made sure he got a dose of their bosom. Mary wasn’t like that. She had a matronly look and an approach to match. She was a babyer, and she wasn’t the only one. It seemed to work, because Stephen opened his mouth. She fed him the spoonful, then wiped his chin with a napkin. Stephen didn’t discourage either the flirts or the babyers. They knew better than to treat him that way with strangers around, but when alone or among friends, he seemed to enjoy the attention of both.
That Stephen attracted nurturing was easy to understand. But he also attracted affection. I felt that for him almost from the start. Part of it was his eyes, blue and full of character. They could impart great warmth. They could to speak to you. They could make you feel connected. To those who were his friends, they were affectionate. To those who didn’t know him, they were inviting. To those who were annoyed with him, they were disarming. When he was in pain he’d scrunch them up, and you’d feel that, too. And if you made him angry, his eyes made you wish you hadn’t.
Waiting for Stephen to finish with his food, I’d started talking to David. We’d somehow ended up challenging each other in arm wrestling. This had been going on for a few minutes with no winner but a lot of grunting. Stephen watched as Mary flagged someone down to remove the dishes.
“What do you have for dessert?” she asked the student-busboy-waiter. “It will have to be gluten free.”
Stephen always ate gluten free, though on occasion, when it was convenient and not obvious, I’d seen carers feed him food that wasn’t. That never seemed to cause any ill effect. On the other hand, Stephen had told at least one friend that he wasn’t really allergic to gluten. So why did he allow, or require, his carers to restrict his diet like that? It was all a mystery to me, but I never asked. In this instance it didn’t matter, because Stephen showed with his grimace that he didn’t want any dessert. Then he went back to watching us arm wrestle.
I wondered if Stephen found our behavior childish or irritating. It wasn’t exactly dignified. But he didn’t seem to mind. He took pleasure sometimes in watching others do what he couldn’t. I noticed that at bars, if young people were dancing, he liked to watch. But I guess he had finally had his fill of vicarious wrestling because at this point he said, “Let’s go.”
I girded myself. We’d soon be at his office, and I’d decided that the minute Mary stepped away to powder her nose, I’d bring up my issue. Stephen and I had debated many things, but this one wouldn’t be an intellectual discussion. I wondered what Stephen’s style was when talking about personal issues. He was, after all, a species of rock star, and most people probably kept any displeasure with him to themselves. The thought of his slow communication didn’t make it any easier. Waiting seven minutes for a few sentences about the quantum origin of the universe was one thing, but this discussion had the potential to get uncomfortable. Who wants to have an uncomfortable talk in slow motion?
I’d heard once that a good relationship is not one that is conflict-free, but one in which conflicts are handled with mutual love or at least respect. If your significant other makes the morning coffee weaker than suits you, you’re supposed to say, Hey, honey, would you mind throwing in a few extra grounds next time, to hit that sweet spot where we both like it? That’s supposed to elicit a response like, Of course, dear! I’d had relationships, though, in which the exchanges were more like, Hey, the coffee’s too weak, and the response is, Next time make it yourself! What type of relationship would Stephen’s and mine be? I figured that what I had to say, and how he answered, could be a test of things to come. It could be a way to deepen our connection or, if it went south, it could make our future work awkward for us.
Mary was dabbing at Stephen’s mouth, and I had already popped up out of my seat when, seemingly from nowhere, Murray Gell-Mann walked up. Apparently he was visiting from New Mexico. I’d seen him only every now and then since he left Caltech in the 1990s. I thought about how, each time I saw him, his hair had grown just a bit whiter, his posture more slumped. Though still in his late seventies, he seemed a little less sharp, too—not that I would’ve wanted to challenge him to a physics contest. In comparison to Murray, Stephen appeared ageless. In the years I was friends with him, I didn’t see Stephen decline appreciably, especially not in the intellectual domain. It was only his communication speed that diminished—and his reading ability, which slowed due to his eye control issues.
I greeted Murray, who then turned to Stephen with a big smile. He was standing off to Stephen’s side. “Hello, Stephen!” he said with enthusiasm. “So good to see you!” Stephen didn’t say anything but aimed his eyes at Murray, put on a huge smile, and held it for a few moments.
“I won’t take up your time,” Murray said. “I just saw you were here and wanted to say hello. You’re looking good!” Stephen then flashed another smile, this a shorter one, but his eyes showed his appreciation.
With that, Murray walked off. Stephen owed Murray a lot. Back in August 1985, just after Stephen’s tracheostomy, it became clear that it would be difficult for Stephen to survive without round-the-clock nursing care, which Britain’s National Health Service wasn’t going to pay for and which he couldn’t afford. Kip suggested that Stephen apply to the MacArthur Foundation for financial support. Murray, then still at Caltech, was on the foundation’s board. And so began a generous string of grants that enabled Stephen to hire carers in those days before his books hit it big.
These weren’t the sort of grants the foundation usually awarded. MacArthur is famous for its “genius grants”—one-time awards meant to be given to needy, unrecognized, and promising young individuals in various arts and sciences. In practice, the genius grants are all too often given to those who are already famous and well off. Stephen, then forty-three, was as much a genius as any of those genius grant recipients but not yet a celebrity—he’d just started to write A Brief History—and he really did need the money.
In physics, you don’t get paid for what you discover. You publish your work, and in exchange you get a tenured position and the satisfaction of having figured something out. You are supposed to be content with a modest salary and a secure job that pays you to do what you love. In 1985 Stephen’s annual salary was about $25,000. Those earnings don’t go far if you have ALS. Fortunately, Stephen’s work on Hawking radiation had elevated him in the physics community by then, if not in the world at large. His name had already been on the map, but after Hawking radiation it was written in the largest of fonts, and so the MacArthur Foundation was happy to help and gave the money to Cambridge University to administer.
Stephen and Jane were grateful for that and felt bad for those who had ALS but hadn’t discovered Hawking radiation. Those individuals would be stuck with what the health service in their country provided—a bed in a nursing home where they would lie incommunicado and isolated, relatively unattended and with little stimulation. In that setting, any of the close calls Stephen would suffer in the coming years would probably be fatal. Without his round-the-clock care, Stephen once said, “I would last exactly five days and die.”
The carers who watched over Stephen during the years I knew him were not nurses, but those who looked after him in the early days were. One of the applicants for the positions the 1985 MacArthur grant funded was Elaine Mason, a tall woman with long, wavy, red hair. She was a nurse at Addenbrooke’s Hospital at the time but preferred to work with a single chronically ill patient. She had a long history of caring for others, including four years tending to the wounded after the 1971 war in Bangladesh. She got the job.
Of the different approaches to caring for Stephen that I mentioned, Elaine would use them all. As the serious nurse she would in coming years save his life on more than one occasion. She would also baby him at times, but in a playful way. And she definitely knew how to flirt. Elaine quickly became Stephen’s favorite carer. Stephen was then in his early forties. Elaine was a thirtysomething who rode skateboards. Legend has it that while Stephen was receiving an honorary doctorate from Harvard, she got bored and started doing cartwheels. If Stephen vicariously enjoyed physical play, Elaine was a great person to enjoy it through. Maybe one reason they bonded was that she had the flamboyance he would have exhibited if he’d had the use of his body.
For her part, Elaine wasn’t put off by Stephen’s physical condition. Just the opposite: she was drawn to it. Her first husband, David Mason, said that all Elaine really wanted was someone who needed her. Unlike Jane, Elaine would accompany Stephen on most of his trips abroad. She loved that he’d travel, work on physics, write books, or just talk, undeterred by the enormous effort it took. She loved his strength. She’d speak and listen to him patiently, appreciative of the time and energy he expended to communicate with her, and she began to confide in him.
Meanwhile, eight years earlier, his wife, Jane, had met someone else to talk to and confide in. His name was Jonathan Hellyer Jones, the choirmaster at her local church. Stephen was physically capable of having sex, but at some point that had stopped happening with Jane. His condition meant that Stephen had always been a completely passive sex partner as well as a fragile one. Over time, his fragility caused Jane to worry that sexual activity might kill him. Making love to him became a frightening and empty experience. Even the thought of sex with him felt unnatural, and her desire for him faded. He had the needs of an infant and “the body of a holocaust victim,” she said. Their passion for each other extinguished, Jane’s marital relationship with Stephen devolved into that of a carer—feeding him, bathing him, brushing his teeth, combing his hair, dressing him. With Stephen submerged in his work and Jane tending to all his practical needs but feeling taken for granted, she and Hellyer Jones became lovers.
Jane talked to Stephen about her affair and got his blessing. Her idea was that she and her lover would keep their relationship private and discreet. Their family would evolve to include them all. It would be a “new arrangement,” a kind of extended family. What Jane didn’t expect was that Stephen would extend the family again—to include Elaine.
If Stephen and Jane had followed a path from man-and-lover to infant-and-carer, he and Elaine followed the reverse trajectory. This led to a new “new arrangement.” It was a constellation as complex as any in the night sky, encompassing Stephen, Elaine, Jane, and Jonathan; the three Hawking children; and their various interconnecting relationships. There was also an added complication: Elaine was still married to David Mason.
That Stephen would mirror Jane and take a lover hadn’t pleased her. Jane knew about symmetries from Stephen’s work, but she didn’t like this one. Still, for a while they all stayed committed to the one-big-happy-family approach. That “while” lasted about as long as you’d expect. Stephen moved out to live with Elaine in 1990, and a decade later he and Elaine built the house that Stephen would live in for the rest of his life. He married Elaine in 1995, shortly after she divorced David and he divorced Jane. He was then forty-eight.
After they were married, Elaine shed the official role of nurse in Stephen’s life. She wanted to help him, to enable him to do all the things that he wanted to do, and to care for him, but as a wife and not a carer. She didn’t want to be the one who’d chop up his meat and spoon-feed him, but she did love cooking for him. She prepared curries, roasts, piles of fruit, rollmops, all his favorite foods. If he wanted something in particular for dinner and they didn’t have the ingredients, she’d run to the store and get them. She loved going out with him, too. Sometimes when they were going somewhere special, she’d get a new dress, and when he came home at night, she’d run to greet him. “I’ve got to show you, Stephen!” she’d say, and she’d go upstairs, change, and then do a fashion show. She loved to hold his hand, and he loved the affection and returned it.
Though Elaine couldn’t sleep in Stephen’s bed, sometimes she’d come down in the middle of the night just to look in on him, or to sit with him and touch him. She felt that Stephen was her gift. “I helped Stephen but he helped me,” she told me. “I came from a dysfunctional family. My parents didn’t look after us very much.” She wasn’t in love with David, she said. “I loved him, but we weren’t in love. I married him because I was twenty-five and he was the first man who asked me, and that’s what you did. So the feeling of being loved was special. And I was in love with Stephen and he was in love with me. He accepted me and loved me for who I am inside.”
Stephen had started the 1960s as a lackadaisical undergraduate and ended the 1970s as a dominant figure in the fields of quantum gravity and cosmology. He never accepted the idea that he was another Einstein, although there were some similarities in their approach, both to physics and to life. They were both geniuses, both mavericks, both visionaries, both distinctively talented at seeing through the clutter to identify the important questions. But they lived in different times, times in which physics was asking different questions, and they faced different personal challenges. That makes it difficult to compare their talents. It’s not difficult, though, to see that they influenced physics on different scales.
Einstein made broad and revolutionary contributions on several fronts. In addition to his special and general theories of relativity, he achieved what many considered to be the first proof of the existence of atoms, and he was the first to recognize Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis as a universal truth of nature and apply it outside the narrow realm in which it was discovered. He wasn’t merely a dominant figure in one area of physics; he reshaped the foundations of the entire discipline. That, Stephen did not do.
The influence of Stephen’s work, on black holes and the origin of the universe, was for the most part limited to the fields of cosmology, general relativity, and the search for a theory of quantum gravity. By head count, at least, this was only a small segment of the physics community. Of course, it is impossible to know what Stephen could have accomplished had he lived in a different era, and/or had he been healthy. Regarding the latter possibility, however, Stephen himself seemed to believe he might have accomplished less, because he would have been less focused, less driven by an awareness of imminent mortality.
While most physicists considered Stephen’s work on black hole radiation to be his greatest discovery, Stephen was not among them. In his view his most important contribution was a far less influential effort, his research in the 1980s on the quantum origins of the universe—a theory he dubbed the “no-boundary proposal.” It was so esoteric that once, after Stephen had given a talk about it to an audience of hundreds of physicists, a colleague remarked that “maybe twenty people in the audience really understood his lecture. It was really heavy stuff.”
At first I was surprised at Stephen’s assessment. But when I thought back to the reasons he got into physics in the first place, his judgment made sense. The Holy Grail for Stephen was to understand the beginning of the universe. He wanted to know where we all came from. And that’s what he believed he accomplished with the no-boundary proposal.
The no-boundary proposal was a natural outgrowth of Stephen’s earlier research, the culmination of the work he had by then been doing for twenty years. His first two research programs—on the origin of the universe and the laws of black holes—were based solely on general relativity, without taking into account the principles of quantum theory. After Stephen studied the quantum literature, he applied what he’d learned to black holes, revised his earlier ideas, and discovered Hawking radiation. Now armed with quantum theory, in his next major research effort he would revisit the origin of the universe. That culminated in his no-boundary proposal, research that he conducted with his friend Jim Hartle of UC Santa Barbara, a couple of hours north of Caltech.
The no-boundary proposal was based on a seemingly odd idea. Quantum theory is normally considered to be, as I have described it, a theory of the small. It is usually used to portray a system comprised of an atom or molecule, a subatomic particle, or a compact collection of such objects. If it is to be applied to the entire universe, one would therefore think that its relevance would be confined to the early universe, when the entire cosmos was atom-sized. But Stephen had a greater ambition, to treat the universe as a self-contained quantum system throughout its history, from its microscopic early days to its vast present-day existence. His main tool in that effort was the revolutionary approach to quantum theory that had brought Feynman the Nobel Prize in 1965.
In the original conception, quantum theories describe the state of a system by a certain mathematical construct—a wave function. The wave function contains everything one can know about the system. That information allows you to calculate various probabilities—for example, the chances that, if you make a measurement, the particle will be found to have a certain position, momentum, or energy. Quantum theory dictates that this is the best you can do—you cannot, as you could in Newtonian theory, guarantee what the result of a measurement will be.
If that were all there was to it, the wave function would be like a reference manual describing the system at some given time. But systems change over time, and the wave function changes to reflect that: given the wave function at one moment, the mathematics of quantum theory tell you how to determine the wave function at any other time. That’s a vital aspect of quantum theories because the usual question in physics is, given a system that starts out in an “initial state,” what are the chances that it will evolve to various possible “final states” at some later time?
The scheme I’ve just described was employed with great success to explain the properties of atoms and the chemical elements from which they are made. Other quantum theories—quantum field theories—were then developed to describe the interaction of elementary particles. For example, the electron, positron, and photon are described by a field theory called quantum electrodynamics. To carry out calculations in theories like quantum electrodynamics was exceedingly difficult. That’s when, out of the blue in the late 1940s, Feynman formulated his new approach to quantum theories. It looked nothing like the original scheme.
In Feynman’s approach to quantum theories, wave functions are not fundamental. Instead, to find the probability of a particular final state of a system, you start with its initial state and consider all the possible ways, or histories, through which it could have developed into the final state. You then add up the contributions from each history, using certain rules Feynman developed. The method is sometimes called the Feynman sum over histories.
To illustrate the idea, suppose you are trying to calculate the probability that a quantum particle evolves from an initial state in which it is located in a lab at Caltech to a final state in which, at some later time, it strikes a detector in a lab on the moon. In Feynman’s formulation, you do that by including contributions from all possible paths between those two labs. That would include paths in which, along the way, the particle goes past Jupiter or circles the earth a million times. It even includes paths that violate the laws of physics, in which the particle flies all over the universe, traveling faster than the speed of light or moving backward in time. Most paths are of that nature. But Feynman’s rules dictate that the direct “straight line path” contributes the most, while the “absurd” paths contribute very little. Still, there is an endless set of paths, each of which does contribute something, however great or small.*
Stephen no doubt admired Feynman for the elegance of his ideas, but I think he also felt a kinship with him as a fellow maverick who shook things up and had to fight to convince others of his ideas. When Feynman unveiled his new approach at a conference in 1948, for example, he met the same sort of resistance that Stephen faced when he announced Hawking radiation. Prominent physicists like Niels Bohr, Edward Teller, and Paul Dirac all said Feynman’s method was nonsense.
Feynman’s theory was indeed radical, and could at first glance appear outrageous—with its particle paths that zigzag all over the universe. In his derivation of it, Feynman had, like Stephen, cut corners and deviated from mathematical rigor. For example, the way you are supposed to sum over paths seemed to violate certain fundamental mathematical principles, but Feynman paid no heed to that problem. Also like Stephen, Feynman preferred to think in terms of pictures instead of equations, an unfamiliar approach that added to the skepticism. “It seemed like a sort of magic,” said physicist Freeman Dyson.
But Dyson and others eventually showed that Feynman’s method could be given a firm mathematical footing, and that—though the theory provided a different picture of what is going on—it would always make the same predictions for the outcome of experiments as the earlier formulations of quantum theories. Feynman was not proposing any new laws of quantum physics. Rather, he was offering a new way of looking at quantum physics, a new way of thinking about the quantum universe, which led to some amazing new insights.
In certain fields, such as elementary particle physics, both Feynman’s conceptual picture and his methods of calculating the predictions of the theory proved far superior to the old ones. As a result, today Feynman’s approach is a standard tool in theoretical physics. Stephen studied the method during his year as Fairchild Fellow at Caltech and while there had the opportunity to learn about the approach from its creator himself. That’s how, ten years later, Stephen came to employ it in his no-boundary proposal—the only difference being (and it is a massive difference) that since Stephen was seeking to trace the quantum history not of electrons or photons but of the cosmos, in his work the entire universe would play the role of the particle.
To apply quantum theory to the entire universe raises many questions. For example, when theorists use the Feynman sum over histories to analyze the motion of an elementary particle, the information they are starting with, and which they want to trace to a later time, has to do with observable attributes such as position. But the universe has no “position”—the universe is all there is.
Instead of concerning itself with position or any of the other variables of interest to particle theorists, Stephen’s theory revolves around variables pertaining to the geometry of space-time—to its curvature, as defined at every point. What does that mean? Consider the space we live in. It has three dimensions—at any point on earth, for example, you can move north/south, east/west, up/down, or in any combination. Mathematics provides a way to describe that three-dimensional space, and, indeed, a space of any number of dimensions. It also supplies a definition of what we physicists mean when we say that space is curved, as opposed to flat.
Since it is difficult to imagine the curvature of three-dimensional space, let’s drop the up/down dimension and think about a world with just the north/south and east/west directions. That’s a two-dimensional space. If you imagine those two directions being defined on a plane, that’s a flat two-dimensional space. It is the type of space you learn about in high school geometry. It obeys rules such as the one declaring that the angles in a triangle sum to 180 degrees.
If instead you imagine the directions north/south and east/west as referring to the surface of a globe, that represents a curved two-dimensional space—a mathematician would say it has positive curvature. The surface of a saddle, in contrast, represents a space that is curved in a fundamentally different way—negatively.
Spaces with positive or negative curvature obey geometric laws that are different from the ones you learned in high school. For example, the sum of the angles in a triangle in a space with positive curvature is always greater than 180 degrees and in a negatively curved space it is less than 180. Such differences allow physicists to determine the curvature of the actual three-dimensional space we live in.
In general, a space can be positively curved at some points and negatively curved at others, as if tiny sections of globes and saddles had been cut out and smoothly patched together. And the magnitude of the curvature, whether positive or negative, can also vary. Space can be slightly curved at some points and severely warped at others, like the peaks and valleys of the earth’s landscape. That’s what’s meant by “the curvature of space, defined at every point.” It is that “landscape,” and its evolution over time, that Stephen focused on in the no-boundary proposal. His theory wasn’t meant to be a detailed theory of all the energy and matter that populate the cosmos—of the stars and particles and planets and people—but rather of the shape of physical space itself.
In calculating the shape of the universe over time, just as in calculating the evolution of a particle, one normally starts with the initial state. Nobody knows the initial state of the universe, so Stephen and Jim Hartle had to make a conjecture. Their guess was that when you go back far enough in time, the great compression of matter and energy into a small space changes things in a fundamental way—it makes time so warped that it is unrecognizable and essentially becomes another dimension of space.
It was Stephen who’d shown, in his Ph.D. thesis, that the “classical” big bang theory, based on general relativity, must have a singularity—a time at which various quantities such as curvature become infinite. Now, when he and Jim Hartle modeled the quantum history of the universe in the above manner, they found that the singularity Stephen had predicted would occur at the beginning of time was no longer there. The laws of quantum theory had inspired Stephen to revise his original theory of black holes and led him to Hawking radiation; now those laws were demanding a change in the scenario he’d put forth for the origin of the universe.
Stephen liked to use a metaphor to explain the new theory. Suppose you are somewhere on a straight train track that starts and ends at some point. Suppose also that moving back toward the starting point represents moving backward in time. In that picture, from wherever you are, if you start moving back in time, you’ll eventually get to a point where time begins—you’ll run out of track. That represents the singularity that Stephen described in his Ph.D. dissertation. But when you take quantum theory into account, Stephen said, the flat track looks more like a track on the surface of a globe, with south representing going backward in time and north going forward. Now suppose you start to move back in time—to move in a straight line, due south. In this situation you will never experience a point where time begins. There is no “boundary” to time, no beginning and hence no singularity.
That is the picture that Stephen derived from his ideas. It answered the question he had asked when he first got into physics: How does the universe begin? His answer was a surprising one—that there was, in the sense I’ve explained, no beginning, because time had turned into space.
To Stephen the no-boundary theory was momentous—not only due to the question it answered but also because of a question it raised. As he wrote in A Brief History of Time, “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really self-contained, having no boundaries or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?” It was a question we returned to in The Grand Design.
Stephen’s office at Caltech was pretty bare-bones. Off-white walls, metal desk, small window, one of those modest spaces reserved for short-term visitors. My office, which was in another building, was more comfortable and cheerful, but when Stephen was in town I’d spend more time in his than mine. I’d sit with him as we worked together, and I’d usually also get there before he arrived and stay after he left.
In the time since I’d last seen Stephen, his communication with me had been sparse. It had bothered me that he hadn’t been more responsive, but I knew that for him writing emails was a slow process that he avoided unless absolutely necessary. I’d assumed that he was writing the sections we’d agreed he’d write and reading the ones I sent him. We’d planned to go over all that during his current visit, and then to push on from there.
That’s why I was so surprised when, the prior day, he had immediately started talking about “global issues,” about what we were trying to say in the book—topics I’d thought we’d already settled. I’d become increasingly uncomfortable as the day wore on and I gradually came to the realization that, in the time since my last visit to Cambridge, he’d hardly thought about the book. We had a deadline that I knew we wouldn’t be held to—we were already far behind. But if, moving forward, Stephen would only work on the book when I was standing over him, I figured one or the other of us would be dead before we finished.
It was only a few minutes after we arrived at Stephen’s office that his carer Mary left the room. As soon as she was out of earshot I started the dreaded conversation. I tried to sound casual. “That was a nice lunch, huh? The Athenaeum does a good job. By the way, I assume you’ve read over what I’ve written since I was last at Cambridge.”
Stephen raised his brow, meaning yes, and he smiled. So he had worked on it. I was relieved. I was glad I hadn’t come on stronger about this. How foolish of me to think he’d ignore his commitments. He started to type. After a minute or so, his voice said, “Yes, it was a good lunch.”
I tried not to look the way I felt. “And our book?” I asked.
He started typing again. “I have been busy,” he said.
“Did you read any of the pages I sent you?”
He grimaced no.
“Did you write anything yourself?”
Another grimace, another no.
I didn’t know what to say. I’d put a lot of work into what I’d written despite having a class to teach, physics research of my own that I was trying to push forward, and another book—Subliminal—that I was in the midst of writing. I knew that he had even more on his plate, plus the enormous difficulty, for him, of doing anything. I thought I should feel sympathetic, yet I found myself feeling angry instead. Fortunately the response I blurted out unthinkingly was somewhere in the middle.
“I’m disappointed by your inactivity,” I said. Having said it, I felt disappointed in me. Who was I to talk to Stephen Hawking that way?
He made a face. I tried to read his expression. What was he thinking? It wasn’t an angry face. It looked like the face a dog might make after you’ve kicked it. Was he hurt by what I said? Was he sorry?
“I don’t want to work on the book if you’re not going to,” I said. “We have to work on it together.” He raised his eyebrows yes in acknowledgment. It seemed to be a friendly yes. That felt good.
I slid my chair a bit closer to him and took his hand in mine. It was warm and limp. I’d reached for it on an impulse. He seemed to be fine with it. I had the feeling he liked it. Maybe he cracked a little smile, or maybe that was wishful thinking on my part. We locked eyes for a moment.
“Do I need to go live in Cambridge until we get back on track?” I said, in a softer tone.
He immediately grimaced no. He definitely did not like that idea. I didn’t know whether this meant he couldn’t afford that much time or that he was repulsed by the thought of having me around that much. Either way, it felt like rejection.
I gave him his hand back. He started to twitch his cheek. He was typing.
“I admit I have been inactive,” he said. “I couldn’t get fired up about the book.”
It felt bad to hear that from him.
“If it bores you, maybe we shouldn’t do it,” I said.
He indicated no.
“After our work yesterday, I am excited,” he said. “I feel I now know where the book should go. I will be more active in the future.”
Mary came back in the middle of that but sat in a chair and ignored us.
Stephen spent the next hour explaining his rethinking of the chapter outline we’d developed. Although the first five chapters hadn’t changed much in this new version, he described them in detail anyway. Then he described the big changes he had in mind for chapters 6 and 7, which was what we were currently working on. When he was finished explaining, he said, “That’s the first seven chapters. Let’s concentrate on them for now.” Our original plan had had eight chapters, and given that we were altering chapters 6 and 7, I expected that the final chapter would have to be altered as well. Based on what he said, I supposed that when we got there we would just wing it.
In the coming years I’d have many frustrations with Stephen. There’d be the interruptions, the starting times that turned out to be an hour or two later than he’d said, the extreme scrutiny with which he’d insist that we examine every sentence, the further rewrites of chapters we’d already written, the illnesses that would stop us in our tracks. When in Cambridge I’d start joining his carers on their cigarette breaks, needing, as I never have, before or since, the psychological crutch and energy infusion that you get from a few drags off an unfiltered Camel. Our deadline would be extended two or three times. But our progress, though slow, was steady, and over time both our page count and our relationship continued to grow, and I never had to have that sort of talk with him again.