Stephen Hawking

The 160 figure and its provenance

The IQ figure of 160 for Stephen Hawking is widely circulated in popular accounts but its original source is not documented. It appears across many websites and popular books without citation to a specific test administration. Hawking himself, in a 2004 New York Times interview, said directly: "I have no idea. People who boast about their IQ are losers."

This puts Hawking in an unusual position among the "famous IQ" canon: he is included because the number is widely cited, but the number has no documented origin. Some accounts attribute it to school testing in his early years at St. Albans School; others trace it to a Cambridge admissions assessment. None of these sources are publicly archived or have been confirmed in his biographies.

Hawking's biographies are extensive and well-sourced, but none of them include a documented IQ test result. His authorized biography by Kitty Ferguson, his sister Mary Hawking's recollections, and the academic biographies by Wolfgang Yourgrau and others all treat the 160 figure as press circulation rather than as a documented measurement.

Early life and Oxford years

Stephen William Hawking was born January 8, 1942 - exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo, a coincidence Hawking later noted with characteristic dry humor. His father Frank was a research biologist who worked on tropical diseases; his mother Isobel was a graduate of Oxford in philosophy, politics, and economics. The family moved to St. Albans in 1950, where Stephen attended St. Albans School.

At Oxford he read physics at University College, completing his degree in 1962 with a first-class result despite, by his own account, doing approximately 1,000 hours of work over three years - an unusually low total even by Oxford undergraduate standards of the period. He has described in interviews a deliberate strategy of identifying which problems required deep engagement and which could be reasoned through quickly.

In 1963, at age 21, he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease (specifically amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS). The standard prognosis at the time was approximately two years. He lived for an additional 55 years. The medical literature has subsequently identified Hawking as one of the longest-surviving ALS cases on record, a fact that has been the subject of considerable medical interest in its own right.

Theoretical contributions

Hawking's major scientific work was on the boundaries between general relativity and quantum mechanics, particularly as they apply to black holes and the early universe. His PhD work at Cambridge under Dennis Sciama, completed in 1966, was on properties of expanding universes and applied the Penrose singularity theorems to cosmology. The work he did with Roger Penrose in the late 1960s established conditions under which gravitational singularities must occur in general relativity.

His best-known result is what is now called "Hawking radiation": a 1974 calculation showing that black holes are not entirely black but emit thermal radiation due to quantum effects at the event horizon. The result was a striking unification of general relativity and quantum field theory in a specific domain, and it implied that black holes have a finite (though enormously long) lifetime. The paper presenting this result is among the most-cited in theoretical physics.

Hawking's other contributions include work on the boundary conditions of the universe (the "no-boundary proposal" with James Hartle, 1983), the information paradox in black-hole evaporation, and inflationary cosmology. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009 - the chair previously held by Newton, Babbage, and Dirac.

A Brief History of Time and public science writing

A Brief History of Time (1988) is among the best-selling science books of all time, with over 25 million copies sold worldwide. The book was intended as an accessible introduction to cosmology and quantum theory; Hawking later acknowledged in interviews that many of the people who bought it did not read past the first chapter, but that the impact of its existence on public engagement with theoretical physics had been significant.

He followed it with The Universe in a Nutshell (2001), A Briefer History of Time (2005, with Leonard Mlodinow), The Grand Design (2010, also with Mlodinow), and several children's books co-authored with his daughter Lucy. Across these books Hawking developed a public communication style that prioritized accessible analogy over technical precision - sometimes at the cost of technical precision.

His later public communication included television appearances on The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and other popular venues. His distinctive voice synthesizer became globally recognized. He maintained that public communication of physics was as much part of his job as research, and his estate has continued this work after his death through the Stephen Hawking Foundation.

Reception, honors, and legacy

Hawking received almost every major honor available to a working theoretical physicist except a Nobel Prize. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, received the Albert Einstein Medal in 1979, the Wolf Prize in 1988, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and the Russian Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2013. He was made a Companion of Honour in 1989.

The absence of a Nobel Prize reflects a structural feature of the Nobel committee's policy: the Prize in Physics has historically required experimental confirmation, and Hawking radiation has not yet been observationally verified. Several of Hawking's contemporaries argued that his theoretical work merited the Prize regardless, but the committee's established practice was unchanged.

He died March 14, 2018, at age 76 in Cambridge - on Pi Day (March 14) and on the anniversary of Einstein's birth. His ashes were interred in Westminster Abbey near the tombs of Newton and Darwin. His estate has continued his public outreach work, and his theoretical contributions remain among the most-cited in the field.

Timeline

• 1942Born in Oxford, England - 300 years after Galileo's death.
• 1959Enters Oxford to read physics at University College.
• 1962First-class degree from Oxford.
• 1963Diagnosed with motor neuron disease at age 21.
• 1966PhD from Cambridge under Dennis Sciama on singularities in cosmology.
• 1970Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems.
• 1974Discovers Hawking radiation. Fellow of the Royal Society.
• 1979Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge.
• 1988A Brief History of Time published.
• 1989Companion of Honour.
• 2009Steps down from Lucasian Chair. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
• 2018Dies in Cambridge on March 14, Pi Day. Interred in Westminster Abbey near Newton.

Frequently asked questions

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