Archive of physicist Stephen Hawking left to academia and museums

Stephen Hawking’s wheelchairs, a trove of his papers on theoretical physics and bets made with colleagues and signed with his thumbprint are among the effects that have been given to academia and museums by the family of the late celebrated scientist. 

Cambridge university library is acquiring Hawking’s scientific papers and journals while the Science Museum Group will preserve the contents of his office, including his wheelchair and innovative communications devices that generated his famous “computer voice”.

The museum said it was aiming to place objects on public display by early 2022 before touring them around the UK. 

Hawking died in 2018 after a lifetime of scientific achievement, having been diagnosed with motor neurone disease in the early 1960s and being told he had only around two years to live. 

The astrophysicist made a series of brilliant discoveries in his field, exploring the relationship between gravity, space and time. He held the post of Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge for three decades, a position once occupied by Sir Isaac Newton. His ashes are buried in Westminster Abbey, between Newton and Charles Darwin. 

Describing an “enormously rich archive”, with 50 boxes of papers spanning childhood letters and early, unseen drafts of scientific papers in Hawking’s own handwriting, Jessica Gardner, university librarian at Cambridge, said it would be a priority to catalogue, digitise and make works available online that have commanded a strong public fascination for decades. 

“It shouldn’t matter whether you’re in Cambridge or Kenya,” she said. “The goal is to make it as open and accessible as possible for all the world.”

The contents of his office shone a light on his creative and collaborative methods, in which he would work through ideas with colleagues via increasingly sophisticated means of communication, the Science Museum said. In order to continue working as his disease progressed, he became a pioneer of assistive technology. The bequest includes a pair of glasses fitted with an infrared sensor to detect tiny movements of his cheek to aid communication. 

The Science Museum, where Hawking’s parents would leave him to wander alone as a child, will also acquire typed copies of bets wagered by Hawking and his colleagues about whether academic theories would be proved right. 

One was made in February 1997 by Hawking and Kip Thorne against John Preskill, both US theoretical physicists. Hawking and Thorne wagered that information entering a black hole was lost forever, contradicting a principle of quantum mechanics. Hawking signed the bet with his thumbprint and kept it in his office — the winner being entitled to claim an encyclopedia. 

At a conference in Dublin in 2004, Hawking conceded the bet and reversed his position, giving a baseball encyclopedia to Preskill — but other physicists questioned whether he was right to change his mind.

Hawking’s effects were acquired under the government’s acceptance in lieu scheme, which allows those with an inheritance tax bill to offset tax by making important donations to the nation by offering them to a museum or gallery, which typically pay nothing. Hawking’s estate settled £2.8m of tax for the archive and £1.4m for the office contents.