Stephen Hawking

When he was six weeks old we took him to America where we saw John McC[lenahan] and family. He seem[s] reasonably happy but a bit homesick and proclaimed his intention of coming back to work in England a year from now. Whether he will be able to support a wife and three sons to American standards on an English salary I am not so sure'. Turning to his nascent professional career, news of a new job is evidently tinged with certain misgivings: 'Although I wrote my first paper attacking Hoyle's theory of gravity, I have now got a job at his Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. Quite how it will work out I don't know but my present work does not impinge on his so I hope to avoid a collision. Anyway, it means a considerable increase in salary'. Stephen Hawking attended St Albans School from the age of ten, falling in with a close-knit group of bright boys whose shared interests ranged from inventing their own board games and listening to classical music to long bicyle rides in the Hertfordshire countryside. Bill Cleghorn was one of the group, along with Hawking's best friend at that time, John McClenahan; the boys spent nearly every moment together, between completing long hours of school and homework and spending time at one another's houses, and their friendships endured beyond their school days, after the group found their separate ways to universities, new jobs and their own families. In 1968, three years after achieving his doctorate, Hawking had applied to work at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge, founded by the renowned Yorkshire astronomer Fred Hoyle the year before. He was awarded the post, but might yet have been justified in the sense of unease he felt about working under his new director: Hawking had gained a degree of academic notoriety at Cambridge following a public challenge of Hoyle, the man he once hoped might supervise his doctoral thesis, and his student Jayant Narlikar during a lecture in 1964. Autograph letters by Hawking are exceedingly rare. Provenance: offered by the recipient..

He claims that a function whose only critical value is zero and which has a local minimum there is necessarily positive elsewhere. It seems to me that there are counter examples to this in finite dimensions – not to speak of the infinite dimensions case’. A reminder about payment for his last week at Maryland and travel expenses ends the letter, Hawking professing himself embarrassed, but mentioning it in case the cheque might be missing in the post. - Stephen Hawking first met the American physicist Charles W. Misner during the latter’s 1966-67 visit to Cambridge at the invitation of Hawking’s postgraduate supervisor Dennis Sciama; the two became close, and Hawking visited Misner at his own institution, the University of Maryland, at the end of 1967. Hawking’s work on singularity theorems, which he first published in his 1965 doctoral thesis, overlapped with the research Misner was undertaking on geodesical incompleteness, a notion at the centre of the concepts Hawking was developing with Roger Penrose (the ‘Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems’). Here, Hawking seemingly refers to a proof that another of their colleagues in the field, Stanley Deser, would publish the following year in the Physical Review Letters, in a paper entitled ‘Positive-Definiteness of Gravitational Field Energy’. - Provenance: Charles W. Misner..

Hawking also announces the birth of a little girl, "Catherine Lucy, though we will probably call her Lucy", born a little plumper than Robert, and very well behaved. - In 2016, over 45 years after Stephen Hawking’s hopeful mention in the present letter of the gravitational wave detectors being built in England - and one hundred years after Albert Einstein first predicted the existence of gravitational waves - scientists would finally have proof of these elusive ripples in space-time: the unmistakeable "ringing" as two black holes collides was heard at the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) on 11 February 2016. When asked for comment, Hawking said that the discovery would "revolutionise" astronomy, noting also that it had proved his calculations of 1970 to be correct: "The observed properties of this system are consistent with predictions about black holes that I made in 1970 here in Cambridge". Hawking and his student Gary Gibbons would go on to collaborate in their research, lending their names to the "Gibbons-Hawking effect", "Gibbons-Hawking space", and the "Gibbons-Hawking ansatz". - Provenance: Charles W. Misner..