A Brief History Of Stephen Hawking -- Friendship Is Part Of Pending Visit

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

Would Stephen Hawking have become the preeminent physicist of our time if ALS had not stricken him at an early age?

What forces led a young Princeton protege of Hawking's to the Redmond campus of Microsoft, where he oversees a multitude of futuristic projects?

Space, time and the fate of the universe govern our lives more ineluctably than weather or politics. But we hardly give them a passing thought. As Carl Sagan puts it, "We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world."

Still, Hawking's first trip to Seattle on Thursday for a sold-out Opera House lecture, Space Needle visit and reunion with Microsoft's Nathan Myhrvold promises to focus attention, if only while he is here, on the Big Questions.

"There isn't any special connection between what we do here and Stephen's work," said Myhrvold, vice president for advanced technology and business development at Microsoft. Hawking's lecture

"was something we felt the whole community could benefit from."

But Microsoft's - and Puget Sound's - technological orientation ensures that "people are bound to be pretty excited about his visit," Myhrvold added.

At Myhrvold's urging, the Redmond software maker became co-sponsor of Hawking's visit with KCTS/9 and Seattle University. The appearance culminates more than two years of negotiations and arrangements by Portland's Institute for Science, Engineering and

Public Policy, which is also coordinating a Hawking lecture Tuesday in Vancouver, B.C.

It comes as Hawking, 51, rides a crest of popularity unparalleled by any scientist since Einstein. His book, "A Brief History of Time," has sold more than 6 million copies. The movie of the book, released in video stores recently, grossed more than $2 million. There's a new video on the making of the movie and a book, called "A Reader's Companion," on the whole Hawking phenomenon.

"He's probably been more successful than Einstein - with his book and lectures - at popularizing some of those ideas" involving relativity theory, said Myhrvold, who likes to tease Hawking that his book outsold Madonna's.

And Hawking has done it all without being able to speak or move. He last uttered words nine years ago. He laboriously signed his name for the final time on Nov. 16, 1979, after gaining the prestigious Lucasian chair in mathematics at Cambridge University formerly held by Isaac Newton.

At age 21, Hawking was diagnosed with ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known as Lou Gehrig's disease in America and motor-neurone disease in Britain. He was told he had 2 1/2 years to live. He fell into bouts of heavy drinking swaddled by Wagner and self-pity.

Before the diagnosis, "I had been very bored with life," he recalls. Suddenly life seemed all too short. Then, abruptly, the disease slowed down, giving Hawking renewed hope and opportunity.

Still mobile but relying increasingly on a cane, he fell in love with and married Jane Wilde: "This gave me something to live for," he said, and a sense of fiscal urgency. The couple, now separated, had three children.

Gradually the disease wore Hawking down. Today he sits in a wheelchair motionless except for his eyes and left hand, which he uses to click a remote control attached to a computer. Diminutive and solitary on a stage, his rumpled body looks like an inflatable doll with the air let out - one of the world's most magnificent intellects indentured to one of the world's least useful physiques.

Hawking selects words from a computer screen, which are then converted, a sentence at a time, to speech by a voice synthesizer. Hawking's only regret, he said: The synthesizer gives him an American accent.

"The thing that really impressed me most is what a great sense of humor he has despite having incredible disabilities," Myhrvold said, adding that Hawking would probably argue the two have nothing to do with each other. Before Hawking used a synthesizer, his slurred speech was difficult to understand. It didn't stop him from kidding around.

"There were times when he was telling a joke that he had to repeat the punch line five or 10 times even for people who knew him well," Myhrvold said. "And he'd patiently go ahead and do so till we got it."

A sense of the absurd must come in handy when considering the big questions. Woody Allen's grades plummeted when he learned about relativity: What was the point of studying if the universe was going to explode?

Hawking had a different reaction: He wanted to figure out why.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Hawking began studying black holes, so named by a Princeton physicist who got tired of saying "gravitationally completely collapsed object." Black holes were stars that collapsed into a point of singularity with such a strong gravitational pull that nothing could escape. Hawking theorized that tiny black holes emitted radiation, now named after him, and would someday explode.

"Because it's proportional to one over the mass, it loses energy in this funny way," Myhrvold said. "The smaller it is the hotter it gets. And so the faster it radiates. So you get this runaway acceleration and eventually the black hole explodes."

Nearly a decade ago, Hawking was joined by Myhrvold, fresh from Princeton University, and a thesis entitled "Vistas in Curved Space Quantum Field Theory." Myhrvold's work on gravity and quantum mechanics had caught Hawking's eye; at the time, Myhrvold seemed destined for a career in physics.

For about a year Myhrvold worked with Hawking. For diversion he took a summertime leave of absence to work with his younger brother, Cameron, and some friends on a windowing operating system for personal computers. Through a series of happenstances, Myhrvold never returned to his study.

The operating system, called Mondrian, was gaining favorable notice in the IBM-and-compatible world until IBM itself issued a commercially doomed program called TopView. Fortuitously, Microsoft stepped in. Chairman Bill Gates had gained IBM's begrudging backing for Microsoft's new Windows program by promising TopView compatibility. Purchasing the Myhrvold-led company, Dynamical Systems Research, was the quickest, easiest way to get it.

Myhrvold and his crew moved from Berkeley, Calif., to Redmond and went on to help Microsoft enhance Windows, today the best-selling computer operating system next to Microsoft's MS-DOS.

Today Myhrvold's influence ripples throughout Microsoft and the personal-computer industry. He has helped attract more than 50 Ph.D. physicists to Microsoft and marshals a burgeoning research operation grappling with everything from interactive television to global communications. Next to Gates, he is Microsoft's most strategically visible executive.

"I'm eager to show Stephen why I'm not an assistant professor someplace," Myhrvold said with a laugh. It's a notion the physicist in him thinks about occasionally, he admits.

"The stuff that I do here probably is going to touch a lot more people's lives more directly than anything I would do in contributing to a quantum theory of gravity or some theory of cosmology," Myhrvold argued. "On the other hand, I think that you can also make the argument that whatever I did in physics would potentially be far more timeless than something here."

After debating with himself a little more, he concluded: "It's a tossup."

Incongruously, Hawking has not won a Nobel Prize, although he predicts he will if a mini-black-hole explosion is ever recorded. He has his critics, who question the magnitude of his contribution and accuse him of playing God. Myhrvold attributes the criticism to professional jealousy.

"Any scientist that makes it in the popular press winds up finding that there is a backlash," Myhrvold said, adding: "The other thing to remember is that theoretical physics in general is full of very smart people with very big egos and there's always a certain degree of sniping one way or another."

Among the numerous physicists Myhrvold has known, Hawking is the most generous with sharing credit and helping others. Once Hawking asked if a graduate student could attend an invitation-only conference whose topic was important to the student's thesis.

"They said only one person could attend, assuming Stephen would," Myhrvold recalled. Instead, Hawking sent a note with his student saying, "I'm sorry you didn't have room for me."

Hawking and Myhrvold took diverse paths, but seem to have embarked on a similar mission of extending the theoretical realm to the masses. Myhrvold converts Gates' Microsoft vision of globally linked information resources to commercial products. Hawking wants the average Joe and Jill to fathom as much of the universe around them as possible.

Hawking says he hopes for a day when a theory of the universe is "understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist."

Said Myhrvold: "If you wanted to have a universal metric by which you could compare civilizations on different planets, one of them would be how much did they figure out about the universe they lived in." Hawking's pursuit, he said, "is a testimony to our species and our civilization."