His career has shed light on the secrets of the universe, from the nature of space-time to the workings of black holes, but there is one conundrum that still baffles the world's most famous scientist.
In an interview to mark his 70th birthday this weekend, Stephen Hawking, the former Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, admitted he spent most of the day thinking about women. "They are," he said "a complete mystery."
Professor Hawking, whose stardom has included spots on The Simpsons and Star Trek, spoke to New Scientist magazine ahead of an international conference held in his honour that begins on Thursday in Cambridge.
The meeting will culminate in a public symposium on Sunday when some of the world's most prominent physicists give a series of talks on the state of the universe. Among them will be Lord Rees, the Astronomer Royal, Saul Perlmutter, who won the Nobel prize in physics in 2011, and Kip Thorne at the California Institute of Technology.
Earlier this week, eminent researchers expressed admiration and respect for Professor Hawking, a scientist who inspired colleagues and students while forging ahead with fresh insights into some of the most intangible puzzles to hand.
Hawking has made a string of contributions to cosmology throughout a career that many doubted would last as long as it has after he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21. He worked on the inflation of the early universe, a quantum theory of gravity, and famously showed that black holes emit radiation and so slowly disappear.
Asked about the most exciting development in physics during the course of his career, Hawking mentioned the findings of Nasa's Cobe (Cosmic Background Explorer) spacecraft and subsequent confirmation by a later mission called the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Together, they made a map of the heavens that revealed the afterglow of the big bang "in excellent agreement with the predictions of inflation", he told the magazine.
As for his greatest mistake, Hawking said: "I used to think information was destroyed in black holes", a belief he later revised. "This was my biggest blunder, or at least my biggest blunder in science." But his work in the field led to the theoretical breakthrough, so far unconfirmed by experiment, that black holes leak information back into the universe through quantum mechanical effects.
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, could do more than anything else to revolutionise scientists' understanding of the universe, Hawking said. The machine could find "supersymmetric" particles, which are partners of the more familiar subatomic particles. Such a finding would be "strong evidence" for M-theory, a version of string theory that describes gravity and the other forces of nature in an 11-dimensional universe.
Comments
4 January 2012 6:18PM
I'm at least a little baffled by most people. I think that's healthy. Entirely non-baffling people are very boring.
4 January 2012 6:18PM
He's just being modest- this guy's a player.
4 January 2012 6:20PM
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4 January 2012 6:21PM
Okay, I fell for clicking the link based on the title - but the rest of the article is much more interesting than Hawking's views on women. He's probably not the first man to feel that way - he's been busy with other stuff after all.
4 January 2012 6:22PM
In this season of Beauty and the Geek ...
4 January 2012 6:29PM
speaking of being baffled, i am baffled by what is the point of this story. this entire story is about hawking and his scientific discoveries and accomplishments, although it starts off with one mention of women in the second paragraph. why was hawking thinking about women most of the day on his birthday? why wasn't he thinking about science, instead? even if he was thinking about women most of that day, what conclusions (if any) did he come to?
or better yet; why mention women in this story at all?
4 January 2012 6:31PM
I knew he was smart:-)
4 January 2012 6:31PM
The fundamental laws of physics are easy compared to the workings of my wife's mind, for sure.
4 January 2012 6:32PM
Amazing bloke and all that, but can anyone name a SINGLE scientific prediction he's made that's actually been verified (which is what, er, scientists are supposed to do) ?
4 January 2012 6:35PM
I think it served as a purpose to get people to read this article who wouldn't usually have bothered. Questionable reason all the same.
4 January 2012 6:36PM
Ah, Yes... women... Can't be reduced to a mathematical formula.
Quel surprise.
Men.. On the other hand...
4 January 2012 6:38PM
Women a mystery? For someone who's an expert on Black Holes?
It's just the same as in deep space - if you get too close to an appropriate woman, her mass increases and time slows down.....you are eventually regurgitated and spewed out into a different universe.....
4 January 2012 6:40PM
This reminds me of Wally Weaver[to Dr Manhattan before his transformation] referring to Einstein in Alan Moore's Watchmen:
"Y'know, I heard he argued with his wife. Crazy, huh? A guy like that, a genius, even he couldn't figure women."
4 January 2012 6:42PM
Good point frenger1.
EnfieldChappie - there IS a parallel universe...
4 January 2012 6:43PM
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4 January 2012 6:46PM
If Stephen Hawking has admitted to thinking about women most of the day, that's all the excuse I need.
4 January 2012 6:51PM
I'm consistently amazed by the ability of distinguished scientists to make sweeping statements about things they know very little about. It's as if being an expert on one thing qualifies you to pose as an expert on everything else. Think Lawrence Summers on women, for example. I guess I should be pleased that Hawking is at least professing NOT to know anything about women (as opposed to professing to know all there is to know), but I still wonder why he's making pronouncements like this at all (or why it's worth a headline when he does!).
Oh, and to save time and energy on the part of others, I'm male.
4 January 2012 6:51PM
What a load of Castor and Pollux.
4 January 2012 6:52PM
Billy Connolly's bit on Stephen Hawking pulling his nurse is hilarious.
4 January 2012 6:53PM
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4 January 2012 6:55PM
could'nt we put two women in the hadron collider.....
4 January 2012 7:02PM
I reckon my wife's dropped my phone charger into a black hole because neither of us can find where she's tidied it away.
4 January 2012 7:03PM
Jeez, just imagine what he'd achieve if he actually concentrated on some physics...
4 January 2012 7:05PM
And like collide them together?
And you think that will give you the formula?
4 January 2012 7:05PM
They could talk for hours over the tiniest little thing.
4 January 2012 7:12PM
Prof knows his stuff...
4 January 2012 7:17PM
I really don't understand this concept of being baffled by the opposite sex. Some women are baffling and so are some men. There are also plenty of men and women that are not baffling at all. You can't expect everyone to think the same way you do.
4 January 2012 7:19PM
And like collide them together?
And you think that will give you the formula? no it'd be funny
4 January 2012 7:19PM
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4 January 2012 7:25PM
Am I the only one to find this comment of his the teensiest, weensiest, subatomic-particliest sexist? I've heard this same sort of line so many times before, the usual subtext being that women are emotional and irrational and therefore unpredictable, whereas men respond rationally and appropriately, so you can know what they are going to do in response to a given stimulus. There is so much bollocks in this that it can only have been made up by a man. Think about it: someone complains that they can never predict how X's are going to behave; do you simply agree forthwith that yes, X's sure are crazy!, or do you suggest that perhaps they don't have enough data or the right data or the right predictive model or maybe they're just DOING THEIR BLOODY SUMS WRONG?
Sorry, I'll go back to shouting about Ron Paul on another thread now. Now there's a black hole that leaks no information.
4 January 2012 7:26PM
Kiz,
Please explain - why do you all say "nothing" and sigh when we ask what's wrong?
4 January 2012 7:28PM
Have I got the point of the article? A woman is like information disappearing into a black hole.
4 January 2012 7:32PM
Oh for f*cks sake........
4 January 2012 7:34PM
...
Hmmmm.
4 January 2012 7:34PM
You mean like the guys down the pub analysing the boring minutae of the latest football game?
But seriously, however little he professes to understand women, much respect to Stephen Hawking for his scientific genius and for battering down so effectively the barriers he faces as a disabled person in our society.
4 January 2012 7:39PM
Um, did you even see the point before you missed it?
The guy was interviewed by the New Scientist. He didn't sit down and write a polemic on women or gender relations. Someone asked him questions, recorded the answers and wrote the most interesting article they could from the results. If you can't understand that, I suggest you don't try reading one of his books.
When Betjeman was reaching the end of his life, an interviewer asked him his biggest regret. He answered something along the lines of "I wish I'd had more sex". Does that mean he was a sex addict or an unpleasant lech? Or just that he gave a throwaway response to a daft question from one of many interviewers he faced over many, many years?
Until you read the article, you can have no idea why or in what circumstances he made that comment. He didn't say women were unintelligible, just that he couldn't fathom them. He is a geek, after all.
Oh no: now I've been geekist!
4 January 2012 7:40PM
Explain???
Isn't it obvious?
4 January 2012 7:40PM
Aw, Diodrus - what he really means is that he loves women! You're all too beautiful. : - )
4 January 2012 7:50PM
No it doesn't.
4 January 2012 7:53PM
A woman has to know one man to know them all - A man can know all the women and not really know any one of them
Does anyone know the quote? The internet isn't much help and that might not be the precise form. I'm sure it was an American female humourist/writer and for some reason the name Elizabeth keeps bubbling up but I can't track it down. Anyway, for what it's worth, it's probably not far wrong.
4 January 2012 7:55PM
He did predict this would happen, before anyone had found it.
And since the maths is a little tricky he's spent most of his career getting it right.
4 January 2012 7:57PM
Some.... !!!
4 January 2012 8:07PM
Huh? That jet in M87 was discovered in 1918, 24 years before Hawking was born.
4 January 2012 8:09PM
Let's be honest here.
It isn't just women who are a complete mystery. People are a complete mystery.
People do irrational, silly and illogical things. Often they're frankly quite stupid.
We're all damn mysteries. We'll probably unify physics before understanding ourselves.
4 January 2012 8:13PM
Spoil sport.
4 January 2012 8:14PM
I suspect (hope) there was more to the interview than him saying he couldn't understand all women, the implication being that all women are the same and they are too complicated to understand.
This is of course bollocks and shame on you Guardian for highlighting it.
4 January 2012 8:14PM
@gerbilator:
"Amazing bloke and all that, but can anyone name a SINGLE scientific prediction he's made that's actually been verified (which is what, er, scientists are supposed to do) ?"
This seems to be a standard question on your part ... Read the article again:
"He worked on the inflation of the early universe, a quantum theory of gravity, and famously showed that black holes emit radiation and so slowly disappear."
Not that the article really gives much information on Hawking's work, I agree. I think the rather silly quote about women being a mystery was just a journalistic ploy to get people to read past the first sentence, and/or an attempt on Hawking's part to deflate the pompous way many people often talk about him. People who are allergic to journalistic devices should, however, perhaps not read newspapers...
4 January 2012 8:26PM
Noted. :-)
Point being he stands to be proved right on the whole Hawking Radiation thing.
4 January 2012 8:27PM
Newsflash. Scientist makes sexist comment.
4 January 2012 8:28PM
There only two mysteries for him: Woman and God. Woman he can at least see, but doesn't Grok ... God he cannot even imagine. If he understood either, he would also Grok the other.