Background
His Holiness is dead
The death of physics icon Stephen Hawking is deeply felt by the Leiden scientists who knew him.
Thursday 22 March 2018
In 2007, paralyzed scientist Stephen Hawking got to experience the weightlessness of space during a parabolic flight. Photo Zero Gravity Corp

Astronomer Matthew Kenworthy shared a memory on Twitter of the famous cosmologist and cultural icon Stephen Hawking following the great man’s death last week. “I used to live very near his favourite curry house. Once, I stopped walking to let him past and he drove over my foot.”

Other Leiden scientists had more to do with Hawking. “I got my PhD in his group”, recalls Ana Achúcarro, Professor of Astroparticle Physics and Quantum Fields Theory. “When I joined his group, he had just had surgery on his windpipe, so we met for the first time at the hospital and he couldn’t talk. I read the newspaper to him and asked yes/no questions, to which he could reply very easily with just his eyes. He was very expressive, so it worked well.”

Achúcarro adds: “He was an amazing person. Despite his handicap, he was doing the science, but also the social part, like discussing the news.’

‘His death is not unexpected, but we all have so much respect for the man and the scientist that there is a shockwave going through the cosmological community. I’ve read several features about him today and came across a few things I can’t really relate to. I don’t know where the rumours of his misogyny come from, and I don’t want to judge, but he was never like that to me – on the contrary: he was always very supportive towards the women in his group.”

Theoretical physicist Jan Zaanen used black-hole physics to learn how certain superconductors work. “After thirty years of advancing knowledge, the work he started provides a much richer picture of black holes in which all sorts of things happen. And we can do such a lot with the string-theory approach that we use to study them, the Anti-de-Sitter/Conformal-Field-Theory correspondence. This field is advancing very rapidly again.”

“While we’re on that subject, I went to a workshop for physicists at the Centre for Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in Cambridge in 2010, thereabouts. It’s a complex with shrines everywhere. The largest shrine in the middle is where Hawking worked, on the top floor so that he was suspended over the institute, as it were. That’s how it worked there: it was a kind of worship. I had started my presentation when suddenly the door opened, and His Holiness Hawking arrived.

“Slightly overawed, I launched a technical explanation in which I sometimes took shots at Hawking’s work. And every time I did, his nurse would start laughing. I couldn’t quite understand how she managed that, because I was discussing advanced physics. Was she extremely knowledgeable about the subject, or did she have a telepathic connection with her patient?

“Some physicists claim that the media overrated him, as if he was a sort of guru. Other scientists have had much more influence on the more recent developments in his field,” Zaanen continues.

“The idea that black holes emit radiation was incredibly brilliant, enough to put him up there with the best. I know plenty of people who’d kill to have an idea that’s half as good as that one,” Achúcarro says.

Vincent Icke, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Astronomy, spoke to Mare about Hawking in 2015, following the release of the biographical film The Theory of Everything.

“Hawking is a genuine hero,” Icke said at the time, “who bravely faced the threat of death. An unconquerable desire to understand the universe created his way of life.”