Going Within (28 page)

Hawking smiled at me again. “Sometimes my voice changes,” he said on the computer, which again translated the words to speech. “When I’m angry, either my voice changes or I run over my students with my wheelchair.”

I laughed out loud but I was profoundly confused by his capacity for such happiness in the face of his personal physical tragedy. And then I caught myself. Happiness or sorrow had apparently been a choice for him. Hawking had clearly made up his mind to cope with his reality.

His nurse gently scooped food into his mouth. His ability to swallow is minimal, but the dribbles onto his chin and tie seemed irrelevant and even humorous. He watched me carefully and must have caught something of my feelings, for his two fingers moved quickly to spell out something else. The words on the computer screen appeared before the voice was activated. “It matters that you just don’t give up,” he said. He continued to gaze at me intently as he waited for my reaction. I blinked and sat down.

I needed to assimilate what had occurred to me in the first two minutes of meeting a human being who seemed to relate to the betrayal of his body as an inconvenience that had not very much to do with the state of his spirit. And on top of that I had never been in the presence of anyone who exuded so much love. This was a physics professor, a mathematician, a scientific skeptic, a person who had stated publicly that he believed in nothing that could not be proved? As I was beginning to realize more and more in my life, people cannot be categorized. I wondered what the rest of the day would produce.

An oval-faced, kindly, youngish woman next to me took my hand. “I’m Stephen’s wife,” she said. “We are so glad you could make it. Let’s get you some food.”

She seemed so down-to-earth and practical. But as the lunch progressed, the introductions to the students were accomplished, and the conversation deepened, I realized that the interplay between Stephen (he insisted I call him by his first name) and his wife, Jane, was much the same as that of any couple; the bond intense, the love and respect apparent, and the barriers of nurses, wheelchairs, and paralysis insignificant inconveniences.

I don’t remember who made the initial foray into the discussion of “truth beyond what is provable.” I honestly don’t think it was I. In any case, Jane said she was often frustrated with Stephen and his scientific approach to truth because she felt that there was
an explanation for life that lay in the lap of the Gods and the heart.

“I don’t like mysticism,” Stephen said via his voice-box computer. “But my wife and I don’t always agree.” He smiled at her and then at me. “But I need the heart because physics isn’t everything.”

He hesitated a moment and then said, “I need heart
and
physics, but I believe that when I die, I die, and it will be finished.”

Hawking’s disease began when he was in his twenties. He said that meeting and falling in love with Jane had enabled him to proceed in his life with hope, and that he could live with the knowledge that his life could end at any given moment as long as he could continue to work.

He had written
A Brief History of Time
for the “popular consciousness” because he wanted to have an “airport book out there on the racks, a book people can pick up in airports and read on planes,” he said. He saw no reason why advanced physics wouldn’t be popular if explained simply. “I can prove the last fifteen billion years,” he said without mis-chievousness, “so I dictated it on my computer, which took almost as long as what I proved, which was only a brief moment in either case.” Then he smiled and again waited for my reaction.

His students seemed to be used to purity of confidence in these sweeping statements. Given that Hawking is acknowledged to have a mind of such incandescent brilliance that there is no way to assess
its potential, this is hardly surprising. He could well be privy to dimensions beyond the reality of the physical world the rest of us inhabit.

“Do you like my accent?” he asked via the robot computer. I nodded, shrugged, and said yes in a qualified way. His face lit up and he went on to say that he had a new computer back in his office, which he was longing to experiment with.

Jane, the nurse, and his students understood that this was the cue to bring the luncheon to a close. Stephen pushed the control button on his motorized wheelchair with one of his good fingers and, like a mechanical human top, he spun his vehicle around on itself and headed out the door of the restaurant. His students barely acknowledged this maneuver, electing instead to discuss among themselves the nature of entropy, knowing that he would run over them anyway. Stephen’s nurse ran after him. Jane took a phone call, and I was left with the choice of running after the nurse and Stephen, discussing the second law of thermodynamics with the students, or waiting for Jane to get off the phone. I decided to run.

The restaurant was on the third floor of the building, which meant that Stephen needed to guide himself into an elevator and descend three floors. He arrived at the elevator and propelled his chair into it just in time for the door to close in his nurse’s face. I could see he was playing a game.

She sighed and bounded down the stairs, with the
clear intention of meeting him on the ground floor. I followed, chuckling in disbelief at the antics of Stephen Hawking playing hide-and-seek.

The nurse of course was late. So was I. The people in the lobby of the building stopped in awe as they watched Hawking speed by them and out the door to charge into the quiet cobblestone streets of Cambridge. The nurse flew after him. I flew after her. Stephen had wheels and a motor, so there was really no contest. And he knew it. He proceeded to guide his chair on and off the curb in a kind of undulating wavy motion, spicing his choreography with a little pirouette every now and then. Cars slowed down, of course, but apparently saw no reason to stop because the hometown intellectual community knew that their mad professor was simply out busting loose again.

Apart from everything else, what really appealed to my sense of theater was that this entire episode was taking place in the rain! The slippery cobblestones glistened with moisture and I was hard put to keep from falling as the nurse and I (she was wearing rubber-soled shoes, I was not) tore after Stephen, who was, no doubt, perfectly comfortable in the knowledge that he had nonslip tires on his wheelchair.

A mile and much gasping laughter later, the nurse and I straggled into Stephen’s office at the university. He was waiting for us with a glowing face and an innocently teasing smile.

Stephen’s secretary felt that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred, and simply inquired whether
he wanted to play with his computer now or later. His answer was a resounding Now.

So the nurse and I dutifully followed Stephen into his office to watch a further display of his childlike exuberance.

My first visual impression as I entered his office was clutter. Clutter of books and papers lying about on his desk and on all the tabletops and on shelves that reached to the ceiling. On his desk there was also a container filled to overflowing with papers. Hanging on the wall was a simple picture of Albert Einstein. Stephen guided his chair to an imposing position behind his desk.

“Look under the papers,” he said. Rather tentatively I began to riffle through them.

“What am I looking for?” I asked. He smiled. I continued to look. Nothing seemed to be in order. There were calculus equations or advanced mathematics of some kind scribbled on page after page.

“Fifteen billion years,” he stated.

“Fifteen billion years of what?” I asked.

“Time,” he answered.

Then I realized that this was his oblique way of telling me his manuscript was under there. I found it.

“Take it,” he said. “I can write another.” I choked. “Take it and you’ll see my corrections in the margins. Tell me if you think this is an airport book.”

I lifted the precious manuscript papers from the mess and held the untidy packet in my hands.

“I can’t do that,” I answered. “I’ll wait and read it when you’re finished. This belongs in a museum somewhere.”

“All right,” he said matter-of-factly, and with that he spelled out how he had written the book on his computer. He described how the machinery enabled him to carry on with his teaching, lecturing, and so on. As he was outlining the process to me, a teen-aged girl entered the room. He looked up at her and pure love poured through his eyes. They began to carry on a conversation in computer-voice shorthand. The subject had something to do with where she was going that night. This was his daughter, and the interpersonal communication between father and child could have been straight from
The Cosby Show.
He wanted to know what time she’d be home and whom she was going to be with. He teased her, and in the end whatever permission she asked him for was granted. She left happy and bouncy.

I wanted to ask him what it felt like to be him, but instead I heard myself say, “When you close your eyes what do you see?”

Without hesitation he answered, “You mean the universe or beautiful women?”

I chuckled. “Aren’t they the same thing?” I answered.

“Oh,” he said, “I don’t know which has more curves!”

With that he spun his chair around from behind his desk and charged out of the office. “The computer
I’m going to play with is next door,” said the mechanical voice as he and his chair exited.

The nurse and I followed. He led us into a small room where two of his students who were playing with some advanced computer screen deferentially peeled away to allow space for their professor.

Stephen abruptly brought his chair to a halt with a flourish and gazed at the technological marvel in front of him.

“This is my new toy,” he said. “I am really an eight-year-old boy at heart.” An unnecessary evaluation if ever there was one. “This is not only user-friendly but user-cuddly,” he went on. I wondered what language he had used in his “airport” book.

In an apparently sudden switch he said, “I have my ups and downs.” And repeated, “It matters if you don’t just give up.”

I was suddenly aware of how important this “toy” was to his survival. He reveled in its potential possibilities.

“These toys will someday be able to do everything but fall in love,” he mused. “And they are clever because they don’t need to have sex to reproduce.”

I was beginning to wonder about Professor Stephen Hawking in a much more personal way. Just as I thought about having some bawdy fun with him, he launched into the discussion that I had hoped for all along.

“Humans,” he began, “evolved in certain conditions
about one million years ago. Conditions are very different now.”

That was all I needed. “Are we evolving then?” I asked. “Or are we going to destroy ourselves?”

“There’s quite a chance we will destroy ourselves,” he answered, which I thought was an interesting way to put it. “Evolution is very slow. The Greeks would have understood our science.”

“But,” I asked, “will conditions change again so that maybe our behavior can change also?”

He tapped out a firm answer. “Conditions
will
change if we don’t destroy ourselves first. But we still behave like primitive tribes.”

“Would the threat of destruction motivate that change?” I asked.

“It doesn’t seem to have had much effect so far, you know,” he said. “When you understand the scale of the universe, human quarrels seem petty.”

“Yes,” I answered, wondering what it would be like to understand what he understood.

“The universe,” he went on, “and everything in it can be explained by well-defined laws.”

“You mean then there are no accidents?” I asked.

“Correct.”

“Then is our behavior also part of well-defined laws?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “Our behavior is part of our human nature, which evolved in certain conditions.”

“And we have inherited that?”

“Yes.”

I thought I was beginning to understand something. “Would you call the universe a loving place?” I asked. “I mean, you said everything could be explained by well-defined laws.”

“Yes.”

“Well then, that means the universe operates within a harmony, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, isn’t harmonic energy loving?”

“I don’t know,” he answered, “that there is anything loving about energy. I don’t think
loving
is a word I could ascribe to the universe.”

“What is a word you
could
use?”

He thought for a moment. “Order,” he said. “The universe is well-defined order.”

“So the question becomes how we define order in relation to how we see ourselves and our behavior?”

“Maybe,” he answered. “What do you mean?”

“Well,” I began. I hesitated in order to think my way through my thought. “Since we are all afraid that chaos may be the natural state of life, you could say that belief in universal order could produce feelings of love, whereas a belief in chaos could produce destruction. In other words, we define ourselves by what we believe the ‘natural’ state of the universe to be and we see our fellow man accordingly.”

“I don’t see the connection,” he answered.

“Well,” I went on, “if we feel the universe is a dangerous chaotic place, we feel threatened by everything it produces, including our fellow human beings;
maybe that’s why our behavior is chaotic, threatened, and primitive. In other words, we behave in direct ratio to how we see the universe. And since the job of science is to explain the universe to the common man, you scientists hold ‘reality’ as a hostage for the rest of us.” Stephen looked up at me intently. “So,” I said, “if you would tell us that the universe is harmonic and well ordered, perhaps we would see ourselves in that same light.”

He smiled. “So far we have not been too successful in eliminating crime,” he answered.

“Maybe you guys haven’t gone far enough in
believing
in harmony. I mean, what is the purpose of your scientific investigation?”

He looked at me from his chair. He didn’t respond.

“I mean, doesn’t science exist as a method to investigate God?”