I recently gave Stephen Hawking a boomerang. It was an odd gift to give the world’s most famous scientist, but Stephen immediately understood its significance.
When I gave it to him, he flashed me the same wise, slightly mischievous grin that I had sought – and was occasionally rewarded with – when I was a rather intimidated young doctoral candidate under his supervision at Cambridge nearly 30 years ago.
What I discovered about Stephen back then, and what I still admire now, is that his intellect and stamina are rivalled only by his irrepressible sense of humour.
Hence the boomerang. It was an inside joke nearly three decades in the making. To understand its punchline, we must boomerang ourselves back to 1983.
In the late fall of that year, I nearly dropped out of my physics studies at Cambridge, fully convinced I was going to flunk my freshman year anyway. But after my father summarized my prospects as a dropout – flipping burgers back home in Quebec, as he put it – I decided to give my studies one last shot.
It was gruelling. I studied around the clock, depriving myself of any semblance of a social life. Apart from my once-weekly bicycle ride around Cambridge, I was practically an invisible man.
But someone, it turned out, had noticed me. The day our final exam scores were revealed – in a Draconian ritual during which all students’ test scores were read aloud in a courtyard for all to hear – a classmate approached me. “Professor Hawking would like to see you,” he said.
My stomach flip-flopped. “Prof. Hawking,” I thought, “wants to see me?” This was a terrifying development.
The world at large had not yet learned of Stephen’s genius, but we Cambridge students were certainly aware of it, and unanimously in awe of it. As I slowly descended the stone staircase toward his office, I was certain he’d be able to hear my knees nervously knocking together.
Stephen, it seems, had got wind that my exam scores were at the top of the class, and he wanted to see if I’d make a good doctoral candidate to take under his wing.
I don’t remember much about the conversation that ensued, but what I do recall is that Stephen gave me a list of books and papers to read over the summer and said he’d see me in the fall.
You bet I read those books and papers, and thus began my year with Stephen – a year that forever changed who I am as a scientist, and as a person.
He put me straight to work that fall. He had recently hypothesized that, in a contracting universe, time would go in reverse. My job was to mathematically prove it.
I dove right into the assignment, but there was a hitch: The math just didn’t add up. No matter which way I sliced the problem, time continued its eternal forward march, even when the universe itself made an about-face.
Imagine my trepidation at the prospect of telling Prof. Hawking – the Stephen Hawking – he was wrong.
And he wasn’t easily convinced. Countless afternoons were spent with me at the blackboard and him insisting I must have oversimplified something, or failed to consider some other thing.
That was around the same time that Stephen’s health went into serious decline. It was heart-wrenching to see a man of such energy betrayed by his own body. As his students helped him accomplish the kind of everyday tasks most of us take for granted, we forged a bond that ran far deeper than any teacher-student relationship.
