Stephen Hawking Read Online Free

journeys outside St. Albans were not always so adventurous. Like many families, they kept a house trailer on the south coast of England; theirs was near Eastbourne in Sussex. Unlike other families, however, they owned not amodern version but a brightly colored gypsy caravan. Most summers the family spent two or three weeks walking the cliff tops and swimming in the bay. Often Stephen’s closest friend, John McClenahan, would join them, and the two boys would spend their time flying kites, eating ice cream, and thinking up new ways to tease Stephen’s two younger sisters, Mary and Philippa, while generally ignoring his adopted brother, Edward, who was only a toddler at the time.

    Frank Hawking was significant in Stephen’s childhood and adolescence by his absence. He seems to have been a somewhat remote figure who would regularly disappear for several months each year to further his medical research in Africa, sometimes missing the family holidays in Ringstead Bay and leaving the children with Isobel. This routine was so well embedded in the structure of their lives that it was not until her late teens that Stephen’s eldest sister, Mary, realized that their family life was at all unusual—she had thought all fathers were like birds that migrated to sunnier climes each year. Whether at home or abroad, Frank Hawking kept meticulous accounts of everything he did in a collection of diaries maintained until the day he died. He also wrote fiction, completing several unpublished novels. One of his literary efforts was written from a woman’s viewpoint. Although Isobel respected his efforts when she read it, she believed that it was unsuccessful.
    Isobel had an indisputable influence on her eldest son’s political ideas. She, like many other English intellectuals of theperiod, had politically left-of-center ideas that in her case led to active membership in the St. Albans Liberal Association in the 1950s. By then the Liberal Party was only a minor parliamentary force with just a handful of MPs, but at the grassroots level it remained a lively forum for political discussion, often taking the lead, during the 1950s and 1960s, on many issues of the time, including nuclear disarmament and opposition to apartheid. Stephen has never been extreme in his political views, but his interest in politics and his left-wing sympathies have never left him.
    Stephen and his friends quickly tired of board games and moved on to other hobbies. They built model aircraft and electronic gadgets. The planes rarely flew properly, and Hawking was never as good with his hands as he was with his brain. His model aircraft were usually scruffy constructions of paper and balsa wood and far from aerodynamically efficient. With electronics he had similar setbacks, once receiving a 500-volt shock from an old television set he was trying to convert into an amplifier.
    In the third and fourth forms, the motley gang of friends began to turn its attention toward the mystical and the religious. Toward the end of 1954, a boy on the periphery of the group, Graham Dow, got into religion in a very big way. The evangelist Billy Graham had toured Britain that year, and the young Dow had been greatly influenced by the man. Dow went on to convert Roger Ferneyhaugh, and the enthusiasm spread. Hawking’s attitude to this craze is open to debate. Most likely, he stood back from this particular game with a certain amused detachment; this at least is the opinion of his contemporaries. They speak of experiencing a toweringintellect, looking on at the reaction of the participants more with fascination than with any feelings of conviction or budding faith.
    Michael Church describes how he felt an indefinable intellectual presence when it came to discussing matters vaguely mystical or metaphysical with Stephen. Remembering one encounter, he says:
    I wasn’t a scientist and didn’t take him remotely seriously until one day when we were messing around