“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.” Every year for his birthday, Stephen Hawking would order fireworks to celebrate. (Image source)

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Where did the universe come from and where is in going? The best-supported theory of the origin of our universe centers on the phenomenon called the Big Bang. The Big Bang event explains universe expansion along with other phenomena like atomic particle creation. That said, it leaves many cosmic questions open like: what happened before the Big Bang?

These are all questions that renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was fascinated with. His insights into the cosmos shaped modern physics and inspired audiences and scientists around the world. Now a year after his passing, he remains an inspirational figure both scientifically and personally in his persistence through a debilitating disease and accomplishments in understanding the fundamentals of the universe.

“I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first”

Born during the second world war, big questions regarding science and philosophy were being asked that no doubt influenced Hawking. He became interested in mathematics and physics and eventually went to the University of Cambridge in 1962. Interested in either cosmology, the study of the very large, or elementary particles, the study of the very tiny, he chose to pursue the former because there were established methods and foundations from Einstein’s theory of relativity.

One year into his Ph.D. program in 1963, when Hawking was 21, he was diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disorder ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Coming from Greek, “a” meaning no, “myo” referring to muscle and “trophic” to nourishment, the disease is characterized by the loss of nourishment and eventual death to neurons that control muscle movement. When the motor neurons eventually die, muscles spasm and lose function, inducing hand clumsiness, slurred speech, and difficulty walking, all symptoms Hawking experienced. With the heart and lungs being essential muscles, atrophy leads to death and he was predicted to only live for two and a half years after his diagnosis.

The early diagnosis of ALS him realize the value of life, declaring, “all my life I have lived with the threat of an early death, so I hate wasting time.” Luckily, he had much more time than he thought, likely due to the types of motor neurons affected or a slow onset of the disease controlled genetically. Perhaps seen as miraculous, or at least anomalous, Hawking was able to live a long life, got married, had children, obtained his Ph.D., developed theories about the cosmos and the beginning of time, and inspired and humored the world over.

Living far beyond his prognosis meant finding ways to live with his paralysis. Hawking stated, “medicine has not been able to cure me, so I rely on technology to help me communicate and live.” For five decades, he was confined to an electric wheelchair, which eventually had an upgraded computer interface to accommodate his loss of speech. The company Intel, hearing of Hawking’s situation, helped make a unique program which would let him select words and phrases with a clicker that would subsequently be read out with a vocalizer. The interface was able to convert the decreasing ability of movement, providing an outlet for his brilliant, churning, and comedic mind. As Hawking’s conditioned worsened, reduced to just a twitch of his cheek muscles, infrared sensors tracked and translated the slight motions taking short sentences minutes to construct.

Now the image of Hawking in his motorized chair, his head cocked slightly to one side with his hands crossed over the controls (often with an additional sly smirk), has become a symbol of endurance and triumph of mind over matter.

“I still keep asking these ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions. Occasionally, I find an answer.”

His condition never stopped him from thinking, in fact, it likely promoted theoretical thought, aiding Hawking to fathom the unfathomable. Embarking on his career, he once declared “My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” Hawking, known to have a strong sense of humor, was extremely serious about this.

One of his main focuses was welding two major fields of physics together, relativity and quantum mechanics, within the context of black holes. Within a black hole matter compacts so dense and concentrated that not even light can escape their gravitational grip where the boundary of a black hole is called the event horizon. Any amount of matter that enters this event horizon is past the point of no return and into the black hole it goes.

Back in the early 1970’s, physicist Jacob Bekenstein proposed that the area of the event horizon is related to the amount of disorder, or entropy. Life experience (and the second law of thermodynamics) tells us that the amount of disorder within a system will increase over time. However, if event horizons suck in all energy and matter, they would allegedly reduce disorder and “remove” things from system. Additionally, the first law of thermodynamics states that energy and matter can neither be created or destroyed, so that energy has to be going somewhere. But where? Because entropy is always increasing, the event horizon should also be increasing overtime and with entropy correlating to temperature, heat is also created and thus black holes must give off radiation. But how?

The use of black holes in science fiction portrays them as entities in space that suck up everything nearby – perhaps transporting swallowed contents to another dimension or universe. Fiction and fantastical speculation aside, roping in quantum mechanics, Hawking showed that light and matter could, in fact, escape a black hole. Quantum mechanics explains that there are limits to how precisely and completely we can know properties of matter, especially where it is and how fast it’s moving. A peculiar outcome of this uncertainty are  particle pairs that flash into and out of existence. In or near a black hole, it would be possible that, where one particle gets sucked into and annihilated, the other would become radiation ejected from black hole. Typically, these entangled particles are extremely brief instances, just transiently coming in and out of existence, but at a critical moment at the event horizon, they could be pulled apart to make black hole radiation (also known as “Hawking” radiation), conserving the laws of thermodynamics.

Since this finding, experimental set-ups have attempted to see and measure this radiation to some degree of success. And though still a theory and not a hard fact of reality, Hawking radiation has opened up many other questions and paradoxes within the cosmos, like the Information paradox. Physics as we know it depends on information never being lost, with the types of information being basic properties of position, mass, charge, temperature, etc. Even with Hawking radiation, the paradigm of a black hole physics still describes that most matter and energy still is annihilated beyond the event horizon. Destroyed and irrecoverable information invites frenzied concern about our understanding of the universe, along with fear of the cosmos “forgetting” everything about us. Some theories instead describe a way that information is maintained and stored, perhaps in a different universe, like ones described in science fiction. In the years before his death, Hawking still immersed in black hole theory postulated that the same principle as radiation could hold for information – that it comes into and back out of the event horizon, saved and stored in the “hairs” of a black hole. Hawking never limited his life to merely asking and answering fundamental questions, he also was adamant about using clever analogies to describe confounding phenomena.

“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”

Not only was Hawking a brilliant scientist, but also an incredible science advocate. He made astrophysics popular partially through his iconic pop culture appearances (appearing on shows like Star Trek, The Simpsons, Futurama, and, appropriately, The Big Bang Theory) but also through his lectures and written works. A Brief History of Time made it possible for non-astrophysicists and quantum mechanics to feel comfortable with concepts like “Euclidean space-time,”  “gravitational fluctuations,” and “infinity.” He wanted more people to be interested in science, in physics, and particularly in space, believing that it held the answers to fundamental questions concerning existing, being, and living. Fascinated himself with the cosmos, he inspired many (including myself) to see the universe as something beautiful, explorable, and knowable.

“If we do discover a complete theory of the universe that should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone not just a few scientists then we shall all – philosophers, scientists, and ordinary people – can be a part of the discussion of why it is that we in the universe exist,” Hawking said. “If we find the answer to that, it would be the triumph of human reason.” He made theoretical physics and mathematics, not just an abstract discipline, but a way of perceiving the world and learning something about the universe’s complexity.

“Maybe that’s where Hawking’s physical condition was helpful, to us if not to him. Static and computerized, he was an otherworldly messenger, almost transparent to the viewer; it was easier to concentrate on his bizarre message without the usual distracting theatre of personality. But he was also, unmistakably, the essence of being—fragile, resilient, witty, dogged in pursuit of the greatest mystery. He lived at the intersection of two equally absurd realms, the cosmological and the physiological, and was eager to serve as a portal between the two. The fabric of space-time was less alarming to consider when it was described by a person who seemed to be woven directly from it.” (New Yorker)

Hawking remains an inspiration both for his promotion of scientific wonder and medical anomalies. The painful muscle and skeletal pain that comes ALS can be excessive, but he tried to live as normal and exciting a life as possible and never let his condition stop him from living. He’d wake up early in the morning, shuffled by his family members from his bed to his chair, he’d go walking with his daughter Lucy, answer questions about the universe from people from around the world, and think about the fundamentals of the cosmos. He also had bountiful opportunities for exciting experiences too; for example, on his 65th birthday in 2007, he took a flight that let him taste the weightlessness of space. During these flights, participants experienced a series of dips that simulate zero gravity for up to four minutes. Along with an entourage of caretakers, he was able to fulfill his dream of experiencing zero gravity and floating in space after being confined to his wheelchair for nearly four decades. “For me, this was true freedom,” Hawking says in an interview. “People who know me well say that my smile was the biggest they’d ever seen. I was Superman for those few minutes.”

ALS took a toll on Hawking’s body and life. It lead to tough consequences and immeasurable strain on his family. Not being able to communicate in the same way as most people, through spoken word and body language, it was extremely isolating and lonely for Hawking. He’s described “not being able to communicate is one of the most frightening and isolating aspects of living with motor neuron disease” especially when people were afraid to talk to him or didn’t want to wait for a response.

Symbolically, the feeling of approaching something like an event horizon has likely been felt by all in our lives. That feeling that you’re unavoidably being pulled into a dark and massive event, that your future looks very bleak and ending soon. It could be from a medical condition, anxiety or depression, loneliness and isolation, desperation and hopelessness, sickness and death. The poet Dante, describing Hell, cried “abandon all hope ye who enter here” which could also describe that loss of faith and hope when possibilities seem finite and doom inevitable, perhaps not terribly unlike the prospect of encountering an event horizon central to the cosmos.

Black holes will come for us, be they in the form of infinite masses from deep space or more metaphorical sources like depression or death, but with Hawking radiation, we know a bit of us may escape and continue to radiate on forever. We all have disasters in our lives, but we must continue living and thriving. “[B]lack holes aren’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought,” Hawking reassured. “When you feel like you are in a black hole, don’t give up.”

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Working towards getting her Ph.D. in Chemical Biology at the University of Michigan, Sarah studies the molecular roads of the cell using microscopes. Outside of research, she is active in science communication by writing for her blog Annotated Science, editing and serving as Manager for MiSciWriters, and having chaired the inaugural ComSciCon-Michigan 2018. Sarah also loves to bake bread, take photos, make playlists, and drink lots of coffee. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.