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    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking
    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking
    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking
    Ebook199 pages2 hours

    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking

    By Daniel Smith

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    About this ebook

    A unique insight into the mind of one of the world's most extraordinary thinkers.

    Undoubtedly the most famous scientist on the planet and the very face of physics over the last half-century, Stephen Hawking is remarkable for many reasons. Not least because he has continued to strive to achieve so much while being hamstrung by debilitating illness. He has demonstrated categorically that if you put your mind to it, you can achieve anything, no matter your physical state.

    Of course, it helps if you happen to possess a mind such as his. His work on black holes put him on the map, and he became globally famous for his A Brief History of Time, communicating the most difficult scientific ideas at a period when he'd lost the ability to speak.

    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking reveals the key motivations, desires and philosophies that make Hawking one of the world's most enduring talents. Studying how he overcame great adversity, fought his demons as well as his detractors and looked back to the origins of the universe, with quotes and passages by and about him, you too can learn to think like the man who claims he can think in eleven dimensions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMichael O'Mara
    Release dateMay 26, 2016
    ISBN9781782435617
    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking
    Author

    Daniel Smith

    Daniel Smith is the originator and writer of ten books in the biographical How to Think Like… series for Michael O’Mara, which have been translated into twenty languages and sold around 500,000 copies. His works of narrative non-fiction include The Spade as Mighty as the Sword: The Story of World War Two's 'Dig for Victory' Campaign (Aurum Press, 2011) and The Ardlamont Mystery: The Real-Life Story Behind the Creation of Sherlock Holmes (Michael O'Mara Books, 2018).

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      For people who don’t know hawking here is it

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    How to Think Like Stephen Hawking - Daniel Smith

    Follow Your Own Path

    ‘If you understand how the universe operates, you control it, in a way.’

    STEPHEN HAWKING, MY BRIEF HISTORY, 2013

    From an early age there were clear indications that Stephen Hawking had a natural inclination towards the sciences, although no one could have predicted that he would become the single most famous scientist alive on the planet. He was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England, to where his parents, Frank and Isobel, had moved in the hope of escaping the German bombs then falling on London. His mother and father also had established ties with Oxford, both having studied at its famous university – Frank graduating in medicine and Isobel in philosophy, politics and economics.

    Frank was a specialist in tropical diseases and had met his future wife while she was employed as a medical secretary in London. He spent some time in the pre-war period based in East Africa but returned to Britain around the outbreak of the Second World War. The authorities considered he would make a more significant contribution to the war effort by continuing his medical research work, rather than by entering the armed forces.

    DESTINED FOR GREATNESS?

    It has often been noted that Stephen was born on the day of the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of the brilliant Italian astronomer, Galileo. To some, this is a most portentous coincidence, although Hawking dismissed its significance out of hand, pointing out that some 200,000 other babies were also born that day, the vast majority of whom have lived their lives utterly unaffected by their ‘connection’ to Galileo. Significant or not, Hawking nevertheless followed in the Italian’s footsteps more closely than any of those other babies.

    Towards the end of the war, the family returned to the leafy North London suburb of Highgate, where they enjoyed a comfortable – although far from lavish – lifestyle. Their numbers were expanded by the arrival of a sister for Stephen, Mary, in 1943, followed by Philippa in 1947 and then an adopted brother, Edward, in 1954. By that time the Hawkings had relocated to St Albans, a historic town some twenty miles north of central London. Given their closeness in age, Stephen and his two sisters played together but also harboured a certain competitiveness. In fact, Stephen has described Mary as a brighter child than he was. For instance, while she had mastered reading by age four, he only learned when he was eight. He put his relatively late development in this area partly down to his parents’ choice of school for him, the progressive Byron House School, which eschewed traditional methods of learning.

    If he was not exactly bookish from the outset, he was nonetheless always interested in how things worked. He had a near obsession with model railways, for instance, and plundered his modest child’s savings to buy an electric set (which performed, sad to relate, underwhelmingly). As he entered his teens, he displayed a similar love for model boats and aeroplanes, devoting a large part of his leisure time towards creating working models. Another of his hobbies was to invent board games, many of which were extraordinarily complicated. A war game, for example, required a board containing several thousand squares. In such ways, Hawking was creating mini universes that he was able to fully know and bring under his control. In other words, he was practising on a small scale for what would become his life’s work.

    The Hawking family provided an environment in which thinking differently was celebrated. Both parents were intellectuals who embraced a certain bohemianism. While that might not have seemed much out of place in 1950s Highgate, it certainly was in suburban St Albans (which Hawking described as having been a pretty staid place at the time). The family, for instance, enjoyed holidays in a gypsy caravan, which they kept on land near the coastal resort of Weymouth – at least, until the county council forced them to move it after several years. They also spent a year touring Europe and Asia in an old London black cab. On another occasion, Isobel (whose own freethinking had earlier seen her become a member of the Young Communist League) took the children to visit an old school friend in Spain who was married to the poet Robert Graves. Stephen subsequently shared a tutor with Graves’s son for the summer.

    In 1951 Hawking was an eager visitor to the Festival of Britain, a celebration of the modern world that the British government hoped might raise the nation out of its post-war doldrums. For the young model-mad lad from St Albans, it was nothing less than a revelation, turning him on to new forms of architecture, as well as the latest scientific and technological trends and developments. Over time, he established himself as a pivotal member in a circle of school friends who shared a passion for science. Tellingly, Stephen was nicknamed ‘Einstein’ by the gang. The group would discuss questions that ranged from how to build a radio-controlled aeroplane to how the universe began and whether there is a god or not. They might not have been the coolest kids in school – Stephen, skinny, unsporty and burdened with a lisp, was the very model of youthful nerdishness – but they were among the sharpest.

    By the time it came to thinking about what he might wish to study at university, Hawking was adamant that his heart lay with physics (the most ‘fundamental science’) and astronomy, subjects he believed would help him ‘fathom the depths of the universe’. This, though, was something of a disappointment to his father, who had hoped that Stephen would follow in his medical footsteps. But Stephen regarded physics, at least in some respects, as a more honest and meritocratic subject than medicine. For instance, many years later he would note that, ‘I have never found that my lack of social graces has been a hindrance. But I think physics is a bit different from medicine. In physics, it doesn’t matter what school you went to or to whom you are related. It matters what you do.’

    The Hawkings had gone out of their way to promote independent thought, so Hawking Snr could hardly have been surprised when Stephen insisted on applying for natural sciences. Stephen’s compromise came in his choice of institution – his father’s alma mater, University College, Oxford. So it was that simultaneously Frank Hawking set his son on the path to scientific greatness, and Stephen asserted his will with the conviction that has characterized his life. Frank need not have worried anyway, since Mary would in due course become a doctor, so keeping that particular family tradition alive.

    Natural Talent Helps …

    ‘My practical abilities never matched up to my theoretical enquiries.’

    STEPHEN HAWKING, MY BRIEF HISTORY, 2013

    That the Hawking family prided itself on its intellectualism was something noted by visitors to the household. Some, for instance, recall that mealtimes were often undertaken in complete silence, with each member of the family having their nose buried in a book catering to their particular interests.

    Growing up in this climate, Stephen quickly became something of an autodidact. School provided him with a good, basic education, but he began to probe into disparate subject areas not covered by the conventional curriculum. That desire to understand ‘how stuff works’ soon had him moving on from taking apart gadgets and putting them back together again to ruminating on questions of scientific profundity that would perplex far older and more cultivated minds.

    Not all of his investigations ended successfully. Indeed, if they had, we may assume that Stephen would quickly have tired of them. That he undertook projects a little beyond his reach is merely indicative that he was already prodding at the boundaries of what he might achieve. Furthermore, as the quote at the beginning of this section reveals, his real talent lay in performing somersaults of the mind, rather than perfecting a practical demonstration of them. If the young Hawking was intent on building a model aeroplane, you could be sure it would be underpinned by brilliant science, even if the finished product did not necessarily match up to that which existed in his mind’s eye.

    It was thus his inquisitiveness that truly marked him apart from his peers as a child. His yearning to be the first to solve problems that have stumped others has remained with him throughout his career. As he put it – somewhat indelicately – in a 2002 lecture at Cambridge’s Centre for Mathematical Sciences, ‘There’s nothing like the eureka moment, of discovering something that no one knew before. I won’t compare it to sex, but it lasts

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