What to tell kids about Stephen Hawking
Newly added: video version!
Stephen Hawking died last night.
I knew I wanted to tell my daughters about him when they woke up this morning, but of course my enthusiasm was greater than my knowledge.
These are the bits and pieces I gathered and told them over breakfast.
First, call him “Stephen”
His friends called him Stephen, and so should you. He believed the world needs all the curious, skeptical, independent thinkers it can get. If you’re someone who challenges yourself to stay open-minded, and never to stop learning and growing, he would call you his friend.
What does it mean that we call him a “genius”?
Stephen was clever and thoughtful, but so are lots of people. So why do people call him a “genius”? Because he was one of the best people in the world at changing his mind.
Some of his most famous discoveries were ideas that canceled out his own previous discoveries! He loved to prove himself wrong, and he eagerly encouraged everyone else to prove him wrong. He didn’t care about getting things perfect the first time; he wanted to jump into conversation with people who knew more than he did, and find the truth in there.
No one is a genius alone
When we call someone a “genius”, we tend to imagine them working alone. But Stephen’s famous discoveries all came from working with other scientists, sharing ideas, helping each other, and arguing about how the universe works.
He loved making mistakes
Stephen was very curious as a child, but that didn’t mean his schoolwork was perfect. He made tons of mistakes in his schoolwork. In fact, he liked making mistakes!
Stephen liked to point out that many great things in history started with some kind of mistake: accidental scientific discoveries, people bumping into each other and falling in love, even the ways that apes were able to evolve, one tiny random change at a time, into humans.
He said, “The next time someone complains that you have made a mistake, tell him that may be a good thing. Because without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist!”
He studied black holes
“Black hole” is a cute name a scientist made up long ago to describe something they imagined happening in space. Scientists thought that when some big stars get very old, they might get so heavy that their gravity crushes the whole, huge star into a tiny, super-heavy ball smaller than a speck of dust!
For a long time, no one knew if black holes were real, or just an idea. Stephen loved studying them anyway, imagining how they could work. (Could you see one? No, because they would be so heavy that even light would be pulled down into them!)
Then, people noticed something very strange in space and wondered if it might be a black hole. Stephen heard about that and wanted to make a bet!
He loved making bets about science
Stephen loved to argue about science, and when he disagreed with another scientist, he often made a bet about who was right. Sometimes he wagered an encyclopedia, sometimes $100. He usually lost, but he was happy when he lost, because he liked to know when he was wrong about something. After all, if you’re right all the time, you’re not learning much!
In fact, Stephen liked to make bets even when he thought the other person was probably right!
The coolest star in the sky
One of his most famous bets was about whether a particular star in the sky was really a black hole.
The star, Cygnus-X1, just might be the coolest star we know of, for several reasons. First of all, it has a super-cool name. It’s part of a constellation of stars that people started calling “Cygnus” because that means “swan” in Greek (it’s pronounced “signess”), and they thought the constellation looked like a flying swan. Can you see it?
Second, Cygnus-X1 is cool because only robots can see it — human’s can’t! It actually shines brightly, but it shines in a color our eyes can’t see. I wish we could see it, because when you peel Scotch tape, it actually makes sparks in that same color, but they’re invisible to us!
Kip Thorne, a scientist who is friends with Stephen, thought that Cygnus-X1 was a black hole. But even though scientists were pretty sure black holes existed, they had never actually found one in space. Stephen bet him that it wasn’t a black hole. Years later, Stephen agreed that Kip was right, and he lost the bet.
But Stephen was actually happy he lost the bet, because it meant that the black holes he studied were really real, not just a clever idea that scientists made up!
What would you do if your computer keyboard only had one key?
When Stephen was in college, the muscles in his body started to slow down and not do what he wanted them to do. First, his legs stopped listening when his brain told them to walk. Later, his lungs and mouth stopped listening when he tried to talk.
He had a very rare disease that almost nobody gets, called ALS. Eventually, there was only one muscle in his body he could control: his right cheek.
What’s amazing is, lots of people helped him create the most unusual keyboard in the world, with only one key: a key that sits on his cheek, so he could twitch his cheek muscle to press it.
How on earth can you control a computer with only one key? Stephen had his computer make lots of suggestions, one at a time, and he pressed the key with his cheek when he wanted to choose the current suggestion.
So the computer might go through the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H…
H ! That’s what Stephen wants, so he twitches his cheek. The H is picked on the computer screen.
Now the computer starts over: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I…
I ! That’s the next letter he wants. What’s he spelling?
(Lots of other people, including me, use special equipment because our bodies don’t work perfectly. We need help from people like you to invent new ways we can use computers, and to improve the equipment used by people like Stephen!)
Stephen actually wrote books this way
Stephen got so good at using his one-key cheek keyboard that he was able to write a whole book this way. Actually, he wrote multiple books! And he even gave talks where he wrote lots of his talk in advance, then used a computer to read his words out loud, and even answered people’s questions.
Does that sound frustrating? It definitely was. Stephen had times he felt too frustrated to work. But then he reminded himself that he was lucky to be alive and to be able to work at all, and he always got back to work.
He loved to imagine how time travel could work
When Stephen started working as a scientist, he tried not to talk to other scientists about his ideas about time travel. Scientists generally agreed that time travel was impossible, and Stephen was afraid they would think he was crazy. But as he got older, he decided to speak up about what he believed, and he loved to talk about how time travel could be possible.
Unfortunately, even though he thought about time travel all his life, he never figured out a way people could travel through time. But he did come up with a truly wild time travel idea: he described a way that the entire universe might one day turn the direction of time backwards!
Students once asked Stephen what he would do with a real time travel machine. He said that he would use it to go back to the birth of his children, the happiest time of his life.
Is the universe shaped like a new kind of circle?
In my opinion, the greatest idea that Stephen and his friends and students worked on is the idea that the universe is shaped like a new kind of circle that we don’t even know how to draw.
I know that sounds wild, so let me back up. Stephen and his collaborators said they thought that the universe has no edges, but doesn’t go on forever.
Think about that for a minute. If the universe has no boundaries, no edges that you can hit if you go far enough, doesn’t that mean it should it go on forever?
Well, can you think of anything else that has no boundaries, but doesn’t go on forever? Maybe something that you’re standing on right now?
You see, when kids and adults asked Stephen to explain what he meant, he told them to think about living on the surface of planet Earth. If you travel all around the world, are you worried that you’ll hit the edge of the world? Of course not.
So the surface of the Earth has no boundaries; you can go north/south (one kind of direction), and you can go east/west (a second kind of direction). But the surface of the Earth all fits in one (big) place, by looping around the planet. So you can travel in two directions as much as you like, even though it doesn’t go on forever.
Well, Stephen says, the universe is like that, too. Except the universe has three directions: up/down, left/right, and forward/backward.
So is the universe shaped like a big circle, or sphere? Yes, except it loops around itself in a new way that we don’t even know how to draw. Stephen said the universe is shaped like a kind of extra-circular circle our brains can’t picture!
(And by the way, if you think you might want to help figure out the shape of the universe and how to draw it, that’s totally a job you could do! The people who work on this think they’re only at the beginning of the process of understanding this, and they want your help!)
He thought aliens exist (but we haven’t seen them)
Stephen noticed how much of the earth has simple life on it, even in the hottest and coldest and driest places. He also noticed how many suns and planets there are in the universe — more than all the people in the world could ever count, no matter how fast they counted. That made him think that aliens are alive somewhere else in the universe, but they’re probably mostly very simple.
“Primitive life is very common,” he said in one talk, “and intelligent life is very rare.”
And then he added, in a bit of his typical sharp humor, “Some would say it has yet to occur on Earth!”
(Oh, and figuring out whether aliens exist, what they might look like, and how to communicate with them — that’s something that you could help with, too!)
Stephen wasn’t perfect
When we talk about amazing people, we sometimes imagine they’re perfect. We have to remind ourselves that even the most amazing people have lots of limitations and ways they need to grow, because that’s true of all human beings.
Stephen wasn’t perfect as a student; sometimes his teachers were frustrated that he didn’t try harder. He wasn’t perfect as a teacher; sometimes his students didn’t feel like he supported them enough. He wasn’t perfect as a father; sometimes his kids wished they had more of his attention.
If we only respect people who are perfect, that’s not real respect. Real respect means appreciating all the ways someone tries hard, grows as a person, and adds to the world, while also understanding their limitations.
Making his cheek-keyboard even better
If you thought going through the alphabet letter by letter would be a slow way to spell out words, you’re right!
After a while, Stephen decided an even better way to do this would be for the computer to suggest words, not just letters. So if he said “Bye”, the computer might suggest: “Lucy” (his daughter), “everyone”, “friends”…
Friends! That’s what Stephen wants, so he twitches his cheek. Now his computer screen says “Bye friends”.
And if we were there and saw this, we might say, “Bye, Stephen.”
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Ben Wheeler is a software developer and teacher in Brooklyn. He’s taught hundreds of people ages 4–84 to program, helped foment an actual revolution (ask him sometime!), and makes a mean gumbo. His work has been published in The Best of Make Magazine. You can see even more of his eclectic interests at his site, techno-social.com.
