Papers and relics testifying to Stephen Hawking’s life’s work will be displayed in UK archive

Jessica Gardner: Oh, Carol, I’m absolutely thrilled that the Stephen Hawking archive is coming to the university library of Cambridge. You don’t get many of these in a career. And this is an absolute career highlight for me. Of course, we already housed the archives of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin. So, this completes the trinity with Stephen Hawking, of three of the Cambridge scientists, perhaps the best-known scientist in the world who changed how we understand our place in the universe. It Is hard to express how much I’m smiling at the moment.

That is such a hilarious episode of “The Simpsons,” isn’t it? The script actually doesn’t contain that wonderful line about the doughnut-shaped universe, so we don’t know yet. We’d love to find out more if anyone knows whether that was ad-libbed, or put in later, or even if Stephen Hawking introduced the line himself. But the scripts include from “The Simpsons,” from “Star Trek,” from “Futurama,” and of course, Stephen Hawking’s personal scripts from “The Theory of Everything,” where he was portrayed so wonderfully, beautifully by Eddie Redmayne, with that cheeky smile that people remember Stephen Hawking having himself.

There are so many, and so many more to find. But let me pick out one letter just from 1964, and it’s actually from his PhD supervisor when he was at Cambridge in the early part of his studies, and he was just 22 at the minute and had been diagnosed, obviously recently, with motor neuron disease. This is from his PhD supervisor to his father, Frank Hawking. And it’s one of those letters that it must have been just a joy to receive as a parent. It’s a glowing testimonial celebrating the work that Hawking is undertaking as a doctoral student, and its concluding lines, you know, talk about what a pleasure it is to teach him. And it goes on to say, remember this is his professor. It goes on to say, indeed, we’ve reached a point where he is teaching me, and I think this is why archives matter. They give you the inside track and the turning points, in this case, in his scientific life.

We are absolutely delighted that the science museum will hold the artifacts from his office and they are, as you say, going to re-create that. So, it really is a collection that, when it’s displayed in the Science Museum, will help to tell, not only his scientific story, but, you know, how he worked physically and the technological innovations we use, like, now to all the media and phones we use in a very common way. But of course, it was groundbreaking at the time. And so, he would be one of the early adopters testing things and feeding back to companies who are developing those kind of tools.

So, our commitment is to make this as widely available as possible. We know that Stephen Hawking was beloved, not just in Cambridge, not just in the UK, but absolutely around the world. And so, that is our commitment. It’ll take us a bit of time, and we will fundraise to help with our efforts. But we will bring, as soon as possible, parts of it to the much wider knowledge of the world that sits at your fingertips on your computer. We actually published his PhD thesis online, openly and freely available to our digital library in 2017, and that went on to break the servers of our library because millions around the world wanted to access it. So, we know there’s a thirst, and the real pleasure of being the forever home of this archive is that we can begin to open up and share those highlights with everybody around the world.