Darkness has fallen on Cambridge, England, and on a damp and chilly evening King's Parade is filled with students and faculty. Then, down the crowded thoroughfare comes the University of Cambridge's most distinctive vehicle, bearing its most distinguished citizen. In the motorized wheelchair, boyish face dimly illuminated by a glowing computer screen attached to the left armrest, is Stephen William Hawking, 46, one of the world's greatest theoretical physicists. As he skillfully maneuvers through the crowd, motorists slow down, some honking their horns in greeting. People wave. "Hi, Stephen," they shout.
A huge smile lights up Hawking's bespectacled face, but he cannot wave or shout back. Since his early 20s, he has suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or "Lou Gehrig's disease," a progressive deterioration of the central nervous system that usually causes death within three or four years. Hawking's illness has advanced more slowly, and now seems almost to have stabilized. Still, it has robbed him of virtually all movement. He has no control over most of his muscles, cannot dress or eat by himself and needs round-the-clock nursing care.
A few years ago, Hawking's voice had deteriorated to a labored moan that only his family and a few associates could understand; one of them always stood close by to interpret his words. Then, in 1985, after Hawking nearly suffocated during a bout with pneumonia, he was given a tracheostomy that enabled him to breathe through an opening in his throat and a tube inserted into his trachea. The operation saved his life but silenced his voice. Now he "speaks" only by using the slight voluntary movement left in his hands and fingers to operate his wheelchair's built-in computer and voice synthesizer.
While ALS has made Hawking a virtual prisoner in his own body, it has left his courage and humor intact, his intellect free to roam. And roam it does, from the infinitesimal to the infinite, from the subatomic realm to the far reaches of the universe. In the course of these mental expeditions, Hawking has conceived startling new theories about black holes and the tumultuous events that immediately followed the Big Bang from which the universe sprang. More recently, he has unsettled both physicists and theologians by suggesting that the universe has no boundaries, was not created and will not be destroyed.
Most of Stephen Hawking's innovative thinking occurs at Cambridge, where he is Lucasian professor of mathematics, a seat once occupied by Isaac Newton. There, in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, he benevolently reigns over the relativity group, 15 overachieving graduate students from nine countries. On his office door is a small plaque irreverently reading QUIET, PLEASE. THE BOSS IS ASLEEP.