Profile Stephen HawkingTime has been too brief so far to assess physicist Stephen Hawking's scientific legacy - but his celebrity and personal courage are beyond dispute, writes Shane Hegarty
The distant future. Deep space. Many light years from Earth. Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Prof Stephen Hawking are playing poker with an android. We enter just as Hawking is delivering the punchline to a delightful anecdote about the perihelion of the planet Mercury, and just in time to hear him pricking Newton's pomposity with an electronic sigh: "Not the apple story again." Then, Einstein tries to call his bluff. Hawking smiles and produces a winning hand - "Wrong again, Albert."
There are few people who get away with slapping down two of the greatest minds in history, but his appearance in that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation confirmed that Stephen Hawking is one of them. To the public he is a genius, his survival almost miraculous; a man trapped in a useless body but whose mind is free to make extraordinary leaps. He is a celebrity who can move from the complex world of quantum mechanics and singularities to selling glasses for Specsavers. He has sold millions of books and filled lecture halls across the world. More important than any of that, of course, he has appeared on The Simpsons, where he got into a fist-fight and told Homer that he might steal his idea of a doughnut-shaped universe.
And in the RDS on Wednesday this week, the man so often described as the smartest on the planet, admitted that he had made a mistake. He has changed his mind about one of his longest-held theories and decided that what goes in to a black hole can in fact come out. Fall into one and you will reappear, just not in a form that will be recognisable to your next of kin.
It was a further twist in what has been an unusual year even by the standards of his unorthodox life. In January, police investigated, and then dismissed, claims that his second wife, Elaine Mason, was physically abusing him. She had been his nurse and was married to the engineer who designed Hawking's famous electronic voice-box, until Hawking separated from his first wife, Jane Wilde, in 1990. In recent years, Hawking's regular trips to accident and emergency had caused much speculation until several of his former nurses came forward and accused Mason of mistreating him. They alleged that on one occasion he was beaten and left in the garden on the hottest day of the year, until he suffered serious sunburn and sunstroke. The police took no action, although Hawking's family has continually expressed concern for his safety.
Hawking was born in 1942 to a botanist father and a Scottish mother who were, he says, eccentric by the standards of the time. The family car was a London taxi and holidays were spent in a gypsy caravan. He maintains that he was an unexceptional pupil as a boy, slightly odd and given to discussing the origins of the universe with classmates who, with canny prescience, nicknamed him "Einstein". Influenced by his father, he felt that scientific research was the natural path to follow. The average pupil went on to get a first in physics at Oxford University.
HE WAS DIAGNOSED with motor neurone disease at the age of 21 and was given only a few years to live. He went into a deep depression and credits Jane Wilde with helping him through it. Gradually, he began to draw strength from his situation. He says that as a youth he was "laid-back and bored with life" and that the prospect of an early death focused his mind sharply.
"I can feel satisfied with what I have achieved because my expectations were reduced to zero," he has said. "I am happier now than I was before my condition appeared."
The couple had three children together, and she says that in the early days he would act as if he had no illness at all. That stubbornness, though, took on a darker edge as his fame grew. In her autobiography, Music to Move the Stars, Wilde described the breakdown of their marriage in harsh detail. He was, she says, a man obsessed with fame, which turned him into a "masterly puppeteer" and "all-powerful emperor". She once said that her role went from promoting her husband to "telling him that he was not God".
Echoing this, his daughter Lucy wrote in the Daily Telegraph that he "had an amazing capacity to push those around him to the very edge of physical and mental collapse, while cheekily smiling to himself".
He has 'critics within his profession too. Hawking enjoys a punt, but when he bet that scientists would not discover a subatomic particle named after Prof Peter Higgs, a physicist from Edinburgh University, he got a little more than he bargained for. Higgs questioned whether Hawking's stature was warranted by his achievements.
"It is very difficult to engage him in discussion, and so he has got away with pronouncements in a way that other people would not. His celebrity status gives him instant credibility that others do not have," Higgs said.
The attention given to Hawking has caused some resentment among physicists, although few are willing to say this so publicly.
"To criticise Hawking is a bit like criticising Princess Diana - you just don't do it," said one cosmologist.
Higgs's comments opened up a debate that had been simmering for some time. Everybody knows of Hawking, but few outside of the scientific community know his theories. Every schoolchild has heard of Newton's apple. Everyone knows Einstein's famous equation, E=mc2, even if they mightn't know what it means. But how often do you hear Hawking Radiation being discussed over the breakfast table?
It has been suggested that, while he is an important cosmologist, he is not so influential as the public believes and that he may have had a more obvious impact on publishing than on physics. In 1988 he published A Brief History of Time and it became one of the most successful science books ever, selling 10 million copies. It nestled on bookshelves between Jeffrey Archer and the Bible, even if its pages often remained unruffled. It was not exactly a rip-roaring read, but it kick-started science as popular literature. While there have been plenty of better written books since, none has had the impact of Hawking's.
It also tied him to a quest that would dog him throughout his career, and which may ultimately have proved a little fanciful. Science, he suggested, was on the verge of discovering a "theory of everything", a unifying theory that would answer the big cosmological questions. It was this that led him to make his famous, tantalising pronouncement that with this discovery "we would know the mind of God".
God, though, has remained a tough nut to crack and Hawking has recently admitted that we are unlikely to sum up life, the universe and everything so neatly. Not that he believes it will stop people from trying.
"I'm now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery," he has said. "Without it, we would stagnate."
He may not be one for self-doubt, but he understands that his celebrity is not down to his scientific achievement.
"It is very embarrassing," he has said. "It is rubbish, just media hype. They just want a hero, and I fill the role model of a disabled genius. At least I am disabled, but I am no genius."
His place among the scientific greats is unlikely to be decided until the next generation is separated from that hype. However, while the complexities of theoretical physics baffle the general public, he takes greatest pride in the moment he conceived of Hawking Radiation, the theory of which stated that black holes should not be completely black but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear - "I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer".
Hawking would like the resulting equation to be written on his tombstone. The alternative is to be remembered as the man who tried to steal Homer Simpson's theory of a doughnut-shaped universe.