Stephen Hawking by John Gribbin

to move just a few feet. His friends helped him as best they could, but most of the time he shunned any assistance. Using walls and objects as well as sticks, he would manage, painfully slowly, to traverse rooms and open areas. There were many occasions when these supports were not enough. Sciama remembered clearly, as do his colleagues, that on some days Hawking would turn up at the office with a bandage around his head, having fallen heavily and received a nasty bump.
    His speech was also becoming seriously affected by the disease. Instead of being merely slurred, his speaking voice was now rapidly becoming unintelligible, and even close colleagues were experiencing some difficulty in understanding what he was saying. Nothing slowed him down, however; in fact, he was just hitting his stride. Work was progressing faster and more positively than it had ever done in his entire career, and this serves to illustrate his attitude to his illness. Crazy as it may seem, ALS is simply not that important to him. Of course he has had to suffer the humiliations and obstructions facing all those in our society who are not able-bodied, and naturally he has had to adapt to his condition and to live under exceptional circumstances. But the disease has not touched the essence of his being, his mind, and so has not affected his work.
    More than anyone else, Hawking himself would wish to underplay his disability and to concentrate on his scientific achievements, for that is really what is important to him. Those working with him, and the many physicists around the world who hold him in the highest regard, do not view Hawking as anything other than one of them. The fact that he cannot now speak and is immobile without the technology at his fingertips is quite irrelevant. To them he is friend, colleague, and, above all, great scientist.
    Having come to terms with ALS and found someone in Jane Wilde with whom he could share his life on a purely personal level, he began to blossom. The couple became engaged, and the frequency of weekend visits increased. It was obvious to everyone that they were sublimely happy and immensely important to each other. Jane recalls, “I wanted to find some purpose to my existence, and I suppose I foundit in the idea of looking after him. But we were in love.” 9 On another occasion, she said, “I decided what I was going to do, so I did. He was very, very determined, very ambitious. Much the same as now. He already had the beginnings of the condition when I first knew him, so I’ve never known a fit, able-bodied Stephen.” 10
    For Hawking, his engagement to Jane was probably the most important thing that had ever happened to him: it changed his life, gave him something to live for, and made him determined to live. Without the help that Jane gave him, he almost certainly would not have been able to carry on, nor would he have had the will to do so.
    From this point on, his work went from strength to strength, and Sciama began to believe that Hawking might, after all, manage to bring together the disparate strands of his Ph.D. research. It was still touch and go, but another chance encounter was just around the corner.

    Sciama’s research group became very interested in the work of a young applied mathematician, Roger Penrose, who was then based at Birkbeck College in London. The son of an eminent geneticist, Penrose had studied at University College in London and had gone on to Cambridge in the early fifties. After research in the United States, he had begun in the early sixties to develop ideas of singularity theory that interfaced perfectly with the ideas then emerging from the DAMTP.
    The group from Cambridge began to attend talks at King’s College in London, where the great mathematician andco-creator of the steady state theory, Hermann Bondi, was professor of applied mathematics. King’s acted as a suitable meeting point for Penrose (who traveled across London), those from