Stephen Hawking. 12 February 1968

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018).

Typed letter signed (‘Stephen’) to Charles W. Misner, Cambridge, 12 February 1968.

One page, 202 x 253mm, headed notepaper. Provenance: Charles W. Misner.

Hawking prepares an application for a post at the newly-created Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge, and mentions a new singularity theorem. After making his request to Misner – ‘I am intending to apply for one of several posts which have been advertised at Hoyle’s Institute of Theoretical Astronomy. I would be very grateful if you would agree to my quoting you as a referee’ – Hawking returns to shared research interests: ‘I think I have a new theorem which says in effect that there is a singularity if one has strong causality, some matter everywhere and either a closed trapped surface or a compact spacelike hypersurface. This is rather similar to Penrose’s original theorem but without the assumption of a Cauchy surface’. After this comes a paragraph devoted to his son, Robert, who is now crawling and must be detained in a bouncer.

Hawking might have felt a particular need for an impressive reference to put before the renowned Yorkshire astronomer Fred Hoyle, who founded the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy (absorbed into the Institute of Astronomy in 1972) at Cambridge in 1967: he had gained a degree of academic notoriety following a public challenge of Hoyle, the man he once hoped might supervise his doctoral thesis, and his student Jayant Narlikar during a lecture in 1964. Here, Hawking enlists the help of the American physicist Charles W. Misner, who he met during Misner’s 1966-67 visit to Cambridge at the invitation of Hawking’s postgraduate supervisor Dennis Sciama; the two became close, and Hawking asked Misner to act as godfather to his son, Robert, who was born in May 1967. Hawking’s work on singularity theorems, which he first published in his 1965 doctoral thesis, overlapped with the research Misner was undertaking on geodesical incompleteness, a notion at the centre of the concepts Hawking was developing with Roger Penrose (the ‘Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems’).

Sold to create an endowment in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, in remembrance of the early contributions of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, and particularly of Joseph Weber, to the advent of Gravitational Wave Astronomy.

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