During one of Hawking's father's frequent absences working in Africa, the rest of the family spent four months in Majorca visiting his mother's friend Beryl and her husband, the poet Robert Graves. The family placed a high value on education. Hawking's father wanted his son to attend the well-regarded Westminster School, but the year-old Hawking was ill on the day of the scholarship examination.
His family could not afford the school fees without the financial aid of a scholarship, so Hawking remained at St Albans. A positive consequence was that Hawking remained with a close group of friends with whom he enjoyed board games, the manufacture of fireworks, model aeroplanes and boats, and long discussions about Christianity and extrasensory perception.
From , and with the help of the mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta, they built a computer from clock parts, an old telephone switchboard and other recycled components. Although at school he was known as "Einstein", Hawking was not initially successful academically. With time, he began to show considerable aptitude for scientific subjects, and inspired by Tahta, decided to study mathematics at university. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics.
Imagine Rocky Horror, but picture the audience in Hawaiian shirts and mandals. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. The original WarGames theatrical trailer. For more, visit wired. How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero — and maybe even changed American defense policy?
Related question: Shall we play a game? In , Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he'd developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him — a rebellious kid who's too smart for his own good.
The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later. Walter Parkes , Screenwriter : WarGames is looked upon as technologically prescient, but we actually started off with a concept that had nothing to do with technology. Lawrence Lasker , Screenwriter : We were complete newbies. In , we didn't even know that home computers could hook up to other computers.
Peter Schwartz , Futurist and creative consultant : I spent 10 years at the Stanford Research Institute , from to the end of That's where all this began. And it was about a boy and a relationship he had with a great scientist named Falken, who was basically Stephen Hawking.
Lasker : For me, the inspiration for the project was a TV special Peter Ustinov did on several geniuses, including Hawking. I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating — that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS.
So there was this idea that he'd need a successor. And who would that be? Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment.
That resonated with Walter. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there. Parkes : Before our conversation, the Falken character was just a way to access the adult side of the movie. It wasn't even much about computers yet.
Schwartz made the connection between youth, computers, gaming, and the military — and The Genius began its long morph into WarGames. Schwartz : There was a new subculture of extremely bright kids developing into what would become known as hackers.
SRI was node number two of the Internet. We talked about the fact that the kinds of computer games that were being played were blow-up-the-world games. Space war games. Military simulations. Things like Global Thermonuclear War. SRI was one of the main players in this. SRI was, in fact, running computerized war games for the military. They found it when they pestered their way onto a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's central nerve center — 2, feet under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.
From here, American and Canadian military officials could detect an incoming Soviet nuke from hundreds of miles away.
Lasker : As we're walking back to the bus that's going to take us to the hotel, James Hartinger [then commander in chief of Norad] walks up between me and Walter and plants a hand on the back of our necks: "I understand you boys are writing a movie about me! I've got 50, men under my command.
You think I can't get you back to your hotel? Plus, I can't drink off the base. So c'mon. We kind of simplified it to "machines are taking over. I sleep well at night knowing I'm in charge. Parkes : We came up with a number of different military-themed plotlines prior to the final story. Later on, it's revealed that OLI stands for Omnipresent Laser Interceptor, a space-based defensive laser, and it's got this intelligent program running it. This was another version of what the WOPR became.
We could never make it work, but I remember doing quite a lot of research into space- and Earth-based laser systems. It turned out to be too speculative, not as specific as what we decided on. There were few if any security measures. It was mostly hackers versus auditing types. The Computer Security Institute comes to mind. I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures.
The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, "Joshua," is clearly a reference to many of my antics. Lasker : David Lewis wasn't exactly the inspiration.
But he was a model. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask, "Can you get a computer to play games with itself? Number of players: zero. During his teens, Hawking, along with several friends, constructed a computer out of recycled parts for solving rudimentary mathematical equations. Hawking entered University College at the University of Oxford at the age of Although he expressed a desire to study mathematics, Oxford didn't offer a degree in that specialty, so Hawking gravitated toward physics and, more specifically, cosmology.
By his own account, Hawking didn't put much time into his studies. He would later calculate that he averaged about an hour a day focusing on school. And yet he didn't really have to do much more than that. In , he graduated with honors in natural science and went on to attend Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge for a Ph. In , Hawking became a member of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge.
The next few years were a fruitful time for Hawking and his research. In , Hawking found himself back at the University of Cambridge, where he was named to one of teaching's most renowned posts, dating back to the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics.
They were married in The couple gave birth to a son, Robert, in , and a daughter, Lucy, in A third child, Timothy, arrived in In , Hawking left his wife Jane for one of his nurses, Elaine Mason. The two were married in The marriage put a strain on Hawking's relationship with his own children, who claimed Elaine closed off their father from them. In , nurses looking after Hawking reported their suspicions to police that Elaine was physically abusing her husband.
Hawking denied the allegations, and the police investigation was called off. In , Hawking and Elaine filed for divorce. In the following years, the physicist reportedly grew closer to his family. He reconciled with Jane, who had remarried.
And he published five science-themed novels for children with his daughter, Lucy. Over the years, Hawking wrote or co-wrote a total of 15 books. A few of the most noteworthy include:. In Hawking catapulted to international prominence with the publication of A Brief History of Time.
The short, informative book became an account of cosmology for the masses and offered an overview of space and time, the existence of God and the future. The work was an instant success, spending more than four years atop the London Sunday Times' best-seller list. Since its publication, it has sold millions of copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages.
A Brief History of Time also wasn't as easy to understand as some had hoped. So in , Hawking followed up his book with The Universe in a Nutshell , which offered a more illustrated guide to cosmology's big theories. In , Hawking authored the even more accessible A Briefer History of Time , which further simplified the original work's core concepts and touched upon the newest developments in the field like string theory.
Together these three books, along with Hawking's own research and papers, articulated the physicist's personal search for science's Holy Grail: a single unifying theory that can combine cosmology the study of the big with quantum mechanics the study of the small to explain how the universe began.
This kind of ambitious thinking allowed Hawking, who claimed he could think in 11 dimensions, to lay out some big possibilities for humankind. He was convinced that time travel is possible, and that humans may indeed colonize other planets in the future. In September , Hawking spoke against the idea that God could have created the universe in his book The Grand Design.
Hawking previously argued that belief in a creator could be compatible with modern scientific theories. In this work, however, he concluded that the Big Bang was the inevitable consequence of the laws of physics and nothing more.
The Grand Design was Hawking's first major publication in almost a decade. Within his new work, Hawking set out to challenge Isaac Newton 's belief that the universe had to have been designed by God, simply because it could not have been born from chaos.
In a very simple sense, the nerves that controlled his muscles were shutting down. At the time, doctors gave him two and a half years to live. Hawking first began to notice problems with his physical health while he was at Oxford — on occasion he would trip and fall, or slur his speech — but he didn't look into the problem until , during his first year at Cambridge.
For the most part, Hawking had kept these symptoms to himself. But when his father took notice of the condition, he took Hawking to see a doctor. For the next two weeks, the year-old college student made his home at a medical clinic, where he underwent a series of tests. Eventually, however, doctors did diagnose Hawking with the early stages of ALS. It was devastating news for him and his family, but a few events prevented him from becoming completely despondent.
The first of these came while Hawking was still in the hospital. There, he shared a room with a boy suffering from leukemia. Relative to what his roommate was going through, Hawking later reflected, his situation seemed more tolerable. Not long after he was released from the hospital, Hawking had a dream that he was going to be executed. He said this dream made him realize that there were still things to do with his life.
In a sense, Hawking's disease helped turn him into the noted scientist he became. Before the diagnosis, Hawking hadn't always focused on his studies. With the sudden realization that he might not even live long enough to earn his Ph.
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