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Hawking's ability to perceive complex truths without doodling long equations on paper astounds his colleagues. "He has an ability to visualize four- dimensional geometry that is almost unique," says Werner Israel, a University of Alberta physicist who has collaborated with Hawking in relating mini-black holes to the new cosmic-string theories. Observes Kolb: "It's like Michael Jordan playing basketball. No one can tell Jordan what moves to make. It's intuition. It's feeling. Hawking has a remarkable amount of intuition."
Now, hoping to fulfill a career-long dream of seeing his books at airport newsstands, Stephen is putting the finishing touches on A Brief History of Time (Bantam), a popular nonmathematical account that will be published in April. "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales," says Hawking. "In the end, however, I did put in Einstein's famous equation E = m c squared. I hope that this will not scare off half my potential readers."
Hawking has visited the U.S. 30 times, made seven trips to Moscow, taken a round-the-world jaunt, and piloted his wheelchair on the Great Wall of China. All this despite daunting logistical problems. "Our party usually consists of Stephen, me, three nurses and sometimes Jane," says Laflamme. "I usually try to arrange group fares." On the road, the activities occasionally deviate somewhat from physics. One night Stephen accompanied a group to a Chicago discotheque, where he joined in the festivities by wheeling onto the dance floor and spinning his chair in circles. Later, in a restaurant, a waiter passed the cork from a newly opened bottle of wine under Stephen's nose. The computer beeped, and the voice proclaimed, "Very good." Hawking was just being polite; the tracheostomy also deprived him of his sense of smell. Says Indian-born Amarjit Chohan, one of Stephen's nurses: "There is an aura around him, a spiritual atmosphere. He is going to end up as a saint."
Meanwhile, Hawking is pursuing a more earthly reward, seeking what Cambridge Astronomer Martin Rees calls the physicists' Holy Grail: a theory that will combine general relativity with the quantum theory. This requires "quantizing" gravity, the only one of nature's four basic forces that cannot yet be explained by the quantum theory.
In the course of that search, Hawking, who has no qualms about recanting his own work if he decides he was wrong, may have transcended his famous proof that singularities exist. With Physicist James Hartle, he has derived a quantum wave describing a self-contained universe that, like the earth's surface, has no edge or boundary. If that is the case, says Hawking, Einstein's general theory of relativity would have to be modified, and there would be no singularities. "The universe would not be created, not be destroyed; it would simply be," he concludes, adding provocatively, "What place, then, for a Creator?"
Indeed, the universe is never far from Stephen's thoughts. Nurse Chohan recalls the day that Hawking's children talked him into a few hands of casino, a card game Stephen had not played since his own childhood. Asked how he could remember the rules, Hawking did not hesitate. It is simple, he responded, "because I play the game of universe."