Univ Record 2018

Honorary Fellows
PROFESSOR STEPHEN WILLIAM HAWKING, (St Alban’s School) died on 14 March
2018 aged 76. He came up to Univ in 1959 to read Physics, and was elected an Honorary
Fellow in 1977. His father Frank also came up to Univ in 1923, as did his daughter Lucy
in 1989.
Readers of the Record will have read many tributes to Professor Hawking in the
international media, which do justice to his remarkable scientific work, achieved despite
a terrible debilitating illness. Here at Univ, we thought that, rather than attempt to sum
up his work once again, we should in this year’s Record offer a more intimate tribute, and
remember the Stephen Hawking whom his Univ contemporaries knew. We are therefore
very grateful to another Univ Physicist who came up in 1959, Gordon Berry, Physics
Professor Emeritus and Director of NISMEC at the University of Notre Dame, for
writing this memoir of Stephen Hawking as a Univ undergraduate (a shorter version of
this tribute appeared in the most recent Martlet):
I first met Stephen Hawking during the final experimental part of the entrance exam
to University College, Oxford in March 1959. Only students who had done well on the
written part took the experimental part. The experiment involved dropping ball bearings
of different diameters down a long glass tube filled with oil, timing them as a function of
the distance as they fell. I suppose we then graphed the variables to see if the balls obeyed
Stokes’ law. Lots of “Professors” came around inundating two of us with questions: myself
and also a fellow at the next lab table. I later discovered that he was Stephen Hawking.
We met again in College in the autumn at the introductory beer-bash for freshmen –
we were just two of the four entering University College as physics students. During the
next three years, we shared many experiences: we became tutorial partners, the two of
us meeting weekly with Dr Berman and later Dr Patrick Sandars for Physics, and with
a Dr G. in New College (his name I forget) for Mathematics tutorials; we were both
coxes on the river, almost every weekday afternoon, for the University College crews;
we assembled together most evenings to play bridge
or poker (pennies and shillings changed hands, and
several bottles of port were consumed), or just went
down to the High Street Inn for darts and drinks
(the “church” where the “prayer books” had handles
on them, according to our college staff).
Two points about the tutorials have significance for
later events: Robert Berman was a thermodynamics
specialist, being the first person to map the interface
of diamond and carbon at very low temperatures
leading to the industrial production of synthetic
diamonds. Steve and I had to cover every detail of
Zemansky’s book Thermodynamics. This knowledge
certainly helped Steve as he later developed his
thermodynamic interpretation of black holes
and his discovery of Hawking Radiation. A good
example (for physics students) of how learning in a
58