THIS is a bittersweet moment. The publication of my father鈥檚 last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, is a triumph in many ways. It is a summation of his career, both in science and in public advocacy on a range of issues that he cared about deeply. It is the fruit of decades of thought and scientific enquiry, as well as hard work, his mastery of technical communication and his experience on the public stage.
From examination of the nature of life itself to exploration of the most mysterious regions of space, the book is a hymn to rational scientific enquiry. Famously, my father said of his 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time that he wanted to see it on airport shelves. He certainly achieved that ambition. I hope this book will fulfil it too.
But this is also a time of great sadness for me. The beginning of this book鈥檚 journey marks a full stop. This is the 鈥渓ast鈥� book. While my father鈥檚 legacy will, I hope, live on in a myriad of different ways, I have to accept finally that he himself has gone.
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For the past six months, that hasn鈥檛 seemed real to me. So much of what we have talked about, thought about, organised, celebrated and mourned since his death has had my father as the central figure. It has been as though he were still there, still the gravitational force holding us all in orbit. Only now do I have the sense that he is departing, leaving us for the final time.
I went to his house the week before last and found it deeply moving. I cried over a table cloth that I bought for him in New Delhi, while I was on tour in South Asia with one of the five children鈥檚 books we wrote together. Odd though it seems, technically I am my father鈥檚 most prolific co-author. Together, we created a series of adventure novels for kids that read like escapist fantasy, except that the science in all of them was accurate and up to date.
As my father liked to say, 鈥淲here Harry Potter has magic, we have science鈥�. I vividly remember reading him an extract I had just written for George鈥檚 Cosmic Treasure Hunt, which featured a character with a startling similarity to his own mother. He laughed so much he nearly fell off his chair. Those were good times.
I admired my father all my life, but never so much as in the final months of his life, when he fought like a true soldier but let go at the end with grace. Born on the anniversary of Galileo鈥檚 death, my father died on Einstein鈥檚 birthday. This final flourish somehow seemed so typical of him, an awesome poetry that left us in bewildered wonderment through our tears.
It feels like no coincidence that his final scientific paper, detailed in this book, concerns symmetry. In the chapter 鈥淲hat is inside a black hole?鈥�, my father discusses work he did with Malcolm Perry, Sasha Haco and Andy Strominger on 鈥渟upertranslations鈥�, infinite collections of symmetries found in areas of space-time far from black holes. These might help resolve the black hole information paradox, the puzzle of what happens to the information entering a black hole, which has generated arguments among scientists for more than 40 years.
Like many other problems on the cutting edge of physics that my father worked on, this remains unresolved. As his lifelong best friend Kip Thorne says in his introduction to the book, 鈥淣ewton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions. And Hawking鈥檚 questions keep on giving, generating breakthroughs decades later.鈥� If Brief Answers is the end, then it is a comfort that the big questions live on.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淢emories of my father鈥�
