Stephen Hawking on black holes and why he'd be a good Bond villain
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In this interview from Wired UK, Stephen Hawking, who has died aged 76, discusses black holes, Bond villains and his belief that the human race will not survive indefinitely on Earth.
On the afternoon of September 23, 2014, a few minutes before his lecture at the Magma auditorium in Los Pueblos in Tenerife, Stephen William Hawking was rewriting parts of his speech. Hawking, who is unusual in being both a theoretical physicist working on some of the most fundamental problems in physics (his most recent paper, in January 2014, was titled "Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes") and being very famous, is a slow writer.
He operates his computer by moving his right cheek muscle. The movements are detected by an infrared sensor attached to his spectacles allowing him to move a cursor on a computer screen attached to his wheelchair. He painstakingly builds sentences at a rate of a few words per minute, a speed that might be slowly decreasing as his muscle control deteriorates. His condition is a consequence of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka motor neurone disease), an illness from which he has suffered since the age of 21 (he took part in the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge in August by volunteering his children: "Because I had pneumonia last year it would not be wise for me to have a bucket of cold water poured over me"). His Tenerife lecture was titled "The Quantum Creation of the Universe." The 1,500-capacity auditorium was packed
"He was changing the content at the very last minute so we panicked a bit," says Jonathan Wood, Hawking's graduate assistant, a position which involves a variety of responsibilities, from technical assistance to managing social media. "He always does that. I produce the PowerPoint slides because he can't. I'm not a physicist, so often he will be talking about things that I don't understand and he'll have to explain what slides he wants." The lecture was part of the second edition of Starmus, a six-day science festival that gathered a group of eminent scientists, including physics Nobel laureate John Mather, biologist Richard Dawkins and Queen guitarist Brian May, who is an expert in three-dimensional astronomy. But the star turn was Hawking.
As he made his way to the stage, helped by his entourage of nurses and assistants, a giant screen showed a video montage which included visualisations of black-hole collisions and footage shot from Hawking's point-of-view in his wheelchair, with "Hole in the Sky," by the doom-metal band AtomA, blaring throughout the hall.
Hawking always starts his lectures with the same quip: "Can you hear me?" Hawking managed to be characteristically funny while guiding the audience through the bold ideas he has developed about the origins of the universe over the past decades. This delivery, a blend of humor and complicated theoretical physics, is the kind of performance that Hawking, 72, is now well known for, even as he has become a celebrity ambassador for science, a physicist whose office is adorned with portraits taken with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Steven Spielberg (twice) as well as stills from his many appearances in Star Trek and The Simpsons.
"I attended his famous inaugural lecture 'Is the End In Sight for Theoretical Physics?'" says physicist Neil Turok, a longtime friend and collaborator. "The whole lecture was given in a very amusing tone, really nothing more to it than a series of jokes. He was bold and naïve and stuck his neck out and said he thought within 20 years it would all be wrapped up. Twenty years later, he gave another lecture, titled 'Is the End of Theoretical Physics Finally In Sight?' He conceded he probably had to wait another 20 years."
Hawking's public persona manages to combine Carl Sagan's popular appeal with Richard Feynman's maverick brilliance for theoretical insight. He has deftly packaged his theories and thoughts (he is known to be able to reflect deeply about physics even when engaged in social events) in popular books, from A Brief History of Time – a bestseller which almost single-handedly launched the popular-science publishing industry – to The Grand Design, co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow in 2010. These books more than anything demonstrate Hawking's propensity for concise and bold statements laced with an unconventional humour. Here, for example, is Hawking deliberating on the idea of the multiverse, the notion that the Universe doesn't