Biography | Stephen Hawking — The Hall Where a Two-Year Sentence Was Handed Down

People remember the diagnosis as a hospital scene invented for a film.

The graduate college that received him was here, Trinity Hall on Trinity Lane, in October 1962.

He had come to work on cosmology under Dennis Sciama at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

He had hoped for Fred Hoyle. Hoyle was not taking him.

The first term went badly. Work stalled.

His hands and feet were already betraying him.

At Christmas he went home to St Albans and fell on the ice. He could not get up.

His mother took him to the family doctor, who sent him on for tests.

He was just past twenty-one. He spent two weeks in hospital.

A muscle sample was taken from his arm. Electrodes were attached.

Radio-opaque fluid was injected into his spine and watched on X-ray as the bed was tilted.

The doctors did not give him a clean name at the bedside. He understood that whatever it was would get worse, and that vitamins were the treatment they did not believe in.

The disease was later identified as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neurone disease. The working prognosis was about two years.

He went back to Trinity Hall and to Sciama. The PhD thesis, Properties of Expanding Universes, was approved on 1 February 1966.

The degree was conferred that March.

The two-year sentence was wrong by more than half a century. The college on the Cam is still the one he walked into in the autumn of 1962.

Photo: Trinity Hall, Cambridge, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: NASA StarChild, public domain