Leonard Mlodinow - Stephen Hawking: A Memoir of Friendship and Physics

I said my last goodbye to Stephen at Great St. Marys church, a five-hundred-year-old structure in the midst of old Cambridge. It was March 2018. I sat on the aisle, and as he passed we were, for one final moment, in close proximity. I felt as if I were with him again, despite the coffin that veiled him from me and the other mourners and that, after seventy-six years, finally shielded him from the dangers and challenges of the physical world.

Stephen believed that death is the end. We humans create buildings, theories, and progeny, and the river of time will carry them forward. But we ourselves will eventually be left behind. That was also my belief, and yet, as the coffin passed, I felt as if, inside that wooden box, he was still with us. It was an eerie feeling. My intellect told me that Stephens blip of existence had passed, as would my own in not so many years. Physics had taught me that someday, not just all that we treasure, but all that we are aware of, will be gone. I knew that even our earth, our sun, and our galaxy are on borrowed time, and that when your time runs out, all thats left is dust. Still, I silently sent Stephen my love and my best wishes for the eternal future.

I looked down at Stephens contented face on the cover of the funeral program. I thought of his strength, of his broad smiles of appreciation and his fierce grimaces of disapproval. I thought of our happy times immersed together in something we were both passionate about. I thought of the rewarding times when we spoke of beautiful ideas, or when Id learn something new from himand of the frustrating times when I would try to convince him of something and he wouldnt budge.

Stephen was world famous for stirring up the physics world, for writing about it, and for doing all that from within a broken body. But just as challenging to someone who cannot move, and especially to someone who cannot speak, is to maintain long-term friendships, to develop deep relationships, and to find love. Stephen knew that it was human bonds, love, and not just his physics, that nourished him. And in that, too, he had succeeded beyond reasonable expectation.

Some of the eulogies alluded to the irony that Stephen, who did not believe in God, was having his funeral in a church. To me it made sense, for despite Stephens passionate intellectual belief that the laws of science govern everything that happens in nature, he was a deeply spiritual man. He believed in the human spirit. He believed that all people have an emotional and moral essence that distinguishes us from other animals and defines us as individuals. Believing that our souls are not supernatural, but rather the product of our brains, did not diminish his spirituality. How could it? To Stephen, a man who could neither speak nor move, his spirit was all that he had.

Stubbornness is my best quality, Stephen liked to say, and I couldnt argue. Stubbornness enabled him to pursue ideas that seemed to be going nowhere, that others rolled their eyes at. It enabled his spirit to dance in the prison of his limp body. Stephens life had proceeded in violation of all his doctors predictions, but on March 14, 2018, Stephens star finally burned out. Now we were all here to say goodbye. His family, his friends, his carers, and his colleagues. He was thirteen years my senior, was supposed to have perished decades before, and had been regularly ill throughout his adulthood with potentially lethal lung infections. But in my heart Id always assumed hed outlive me.

I came to know Stephen after he contacted me in 2003. He asked if I would consider writing with him. Hed read my books, Euclids Window, about curved space, and Feynmans Rainbow, about my relationship with the legendary physicist. He said that he liked my writing, and he liked that I was a fellow physicist who could understand his work. I was stunned. I was flattered. In the ensuing years, he and I would write two books together, and we would also become friends.

The first book we wrote was A Briefer History of Time. That wasnt an original work. It was a rewrite of Stephens famous A Brief History of Time. His idea was to make the original more understandable. Kip Thorne, a Caltech theoretical physicist who was one of Stephens closest friends, once told me that the more physics you know, the less you understand A Brief History. Stephen put it a little differently. Everybody bought it, he said. Not many read it.

A Briefer History of Time was published in 2005. I was on the faculty of Caltech at the time. Stephen lived in England, but he visited Caltech each year, for two to four weeks. His visits, and our email communication, had been enough for us to complete