Free Stephen Hawking by John Gribbin Page A

club brought the nineteen-year-old out of himself and gave him an opportunity to become part of the university “in crowd.”
    When old school friends encountered Hawking during his second year, they could hardly believe the change in him. Variously described as “one of the lads” and “definitely raffish,” the slender, tousle-haired youth in his pink rowing club scarf seemed a far cry from the gawky schoolboy who had left St. Albans School less than two years earlier. He was no longer a social also-ran but a fully paid-up member of the “right” social set. It was very much an all-male domain; women rarely entered this world. It was, in a way, a continuation of the gang at St. Albans School, without the intellectual intensity but with a lot more alcohol. The idea was to drink copious amounts of ale, recount vaguely lurid stories, and have as much harmless fun as possible. However, his newfound taste for adventure almost got him into trouble.
    One night he decided to create a splash. After a few beers with a friend, the two of them headed off to one of the footbridges spanning the river. After leaving the pub, they picked up a can of paint and some brushes they had left at the college and hidden them inside a bag. When they arrived at the bridge, they set up a couple of wooden planks parallel to the span and suspended them over the water by a carefully arranged rope a few feet below the parapet. Clambering over the side, they positioned themselves on the planks with the can of paint and brushes and began to write. A few minutes later, just visible in the dark, were the words VOTE LIBERAL in foot-high letters along the side of the bridge and clear to anyone on the river when daylight broke.
    Then disaster struck. Just as Hawking was finishing off the last letter, the beam of a flashlight shone down on them from the bridge and an angry voice called out, “And what do you think you’re up to, then?” It was a local policeman. The two panicked, and Hawking’s friend scurried off the planks and onto the riverbank, hightailing it back to town and leaving Hawking with paintbrush in hand to face the music. The story goes that he simply got a ticking off from the local constabulary, and the incident was eventually forgotten. But it must have had the desired effect of scaring the life out of him, because he never clashed with the law again.

    Less than three years after arriving at Oxford University, Hawking again had to face the music when finals approached, and he suddenly found that he could have been better prepared. Dr. Berman knew that Hawking, for all his innate ability, would find the examinations harder than he anticipated. Berman realized that there were two types of student who did well at Oxford: those who were bright and worked very hard, and those who had great natural talent and worked very little. It was always the former who achieved greater things in written papers. That was the way of exams: winning end-of-year prizes was one thing, but finals were in a different league. They were all or nothing, the focal point of the whole three years of study. Hawking once calculated that during the entire three years of his course at Oxford he had done something like 1,000 hours’ work, an average of one hour per day—hardly a foundation for the arduous finals. One friend rememberswith amusement, “Towards the end he was working as much as three hours a day!”
    However, Hawking had devised a plan. Because candidates had a wide choice of questions from each paper, he would, he decided, attempt only theoretical-physics problems and ignore those requiring detailed factual knowledge. He knew that he could do any theoretical question by using his proven natural talent and intuitive understanding of the subject. But there was an additional problem to complicate things: he had applied to Cambridge to begin Ph.D. studies in cosmology under the most distinguished British