It isn't easy interviewing Stephen Hawking, and not only because his disability is now so severe that the formulation of even a short sentence via his computer can take 20 minutes. Nor is it because the life of the author of A Brief History of Time is so forbiddingly full of myth and drama - though when you see the fat wedge of newspaper cuttings and the perilous tower of books that you really should tackle before you meet him, you do wonder, with a doomy feeling in the pit of your stomach, how you will ever scratch your way through the enamel of other people's words and get down a few of your own. No, the real difficulty lies in the stuff that you cannot understand, that you cannot... REACH. Mystery swirls about him like mist over a bottomless quarry. First, there is the physics: black holes, singularities, multiple dimensions; theories that, it is now suspected, will never be proven, and so must be admired mostly for their mathematical beauty (which is tricky if, as an O Level student, you found it hard to balance a simple equation). Then there is the more human problem of motivation, of feeling. What is he thinking? He cannot be worrying at quantum physics 24 hours a day, but of his attitudes to other things - of what lies in his heart - we know very little. So, we fall on details - his fondness for jokes, his willingness to do the voiceover for his famous cameo in The Simpsons - and turn them into the man. What a kidder!
Oh, well. The difficulties involved are as nothing compared with how fascinating his world is - and by this I mean not string theory and all who twang in it, but the people around him: his family, who love him, but who have been through such a lot; his colleagues, who cannot but admire him, but who are also, being dons, jealous of his success; his carers and assistants who keep the Hawking show on the road; and his fans, whose adoring and often nutty letters lie in great drifts in the office of his PA.
If someone crammed this cast, not to mention Hawking, with his diving-bell body and butterfly mind, into a novel, you'd be gripped but disbelieving. As it is, he sucks me in early, from the moment I begin typing out the six questions - yes, just six - that I'm required to send him before our meeting. How to avoid getting yes-and-no answers? How to avoid seeming very stupid? It's like some crazy high-stakes philosophical game. Interesting, too, that this is the drill: I send questions, he prepares answers, then I ask them again face to face in an ersatz, performance version of an interview, when we both know that his replies, once he has put them laboriously into his computer, could be emailed to me in a second. He wants my presence, is willing to waste time on it. Why? You could put it down to generosity: he is kind enough to satisfy my curiosity. Or you might argue that, as ever, he stubbornly likes to maintain the illusion that he leads a normal life. But there is a third explanation, and that is that Professor Hawking is a public-relations whizz as well as a mathematical one.
The Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University, where Hawking is the Lucasian professor of mathematics, a post once held by Isaac Newton, is housed in a ritzy building which, with its curved roof and glass turrets, nods in the direction of an observatory (though it's such a modernist nightmare, this may be purely accidental). It has rising Tellytubby lawns and a computerised screen in its lobby that tells you what lectures are taking place. It is light years away from the pale, introverted elegance of Gonville and Caius College, where Hawking is a fellow. Hawking's office is high up, and adjoins the cubbyholes of his personal assistant Judith Croasdell, aka the gatekeeper, and Sam Blackburn, his technical assistant, an electronic engineering graduate whose job it is to keep Hawking's creaky computer and ailing wheelchair on the road (he needs a new wheelchair the way most academics need a new Citroen estate - bits will keep dropping off it - and it is hoped that an up-to-date machine will arrive soon).
The atmosphere up here is hushed, and weirdly nervy, I think. Is this because everyone is concentrating on their sums, or is it because, as I have heard, Hawking, the bleep of whose computer I can hear behind his closed door, is such a very demanding boss? Croasdell gives me a look. 'Well, he's quite daunting,' she says. When she got her job three years ago, she spent months trying to work out how he copes with 'the full force of his disease'. (Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neurone disease, when he was 21; now 66, he is completely paralysed, able to move only slightly a few muscles in his face.) Slowly, however, she came to terms with the disjunction between his appearance (frail), and his mind (fierce). 'You realise you've got this formidable boss, that it's the intellect that you're dealing with, not the wheelchair. He has evolved in his wheelchair. He has no self-pity at all. It works for him completely. The courage, the fortitude, the strength of will that has got him through 40 years at this university; the sense of humour.' But he can be difficult? 'Yes. He drives me ballistic sometimes. He's not always easy. He can be cutting, very snubbing. [When he is cross] the lip goes down.' He is also extremely beady. 'He's got these little antennae. He notices everything. He's well aware of the impact he creates.' So what did he make of my questions? 'I think you did very well,' she says, kindly. The point is, he has answered them; sometimes, they get marked 'Return to sender'.
She takes me into his office. Professor Hawking is small in his black chair, but his eyes are wide in greeting and very blue. Judith stands behind him. On a sofa at the other side of the room, one of his team of round-the-clock carers is reading a Maeve Binchy novel, a detail I find pleasing, possibly because she is sitting opposite a blackboard on which there is scribbled an equation of hilarious ticker-tape proportions. Hello, I say. A bout of prolonged beeping ensues: the sound of Hawking tweaking his answers before sending them to his voice synthesiser. Attached to the arm of his glasses is an infra-red beam with which, by clenching a muscle in his right cheek, he moves the cursor on a screen dictionary he uses to select words. Only when a sentence or paragraph is complete does he send it to his synthesiser to be 'spoken'. This process is painfully effortful, but it's also touching. I've already asked Sam what will happen when Hawking loses the use of his cheek: new technology is available that requires only the movement of the eyes, but Hawking is always reluctant to switch to more sophisticated hardware even if it makes life easier, because he takes every such move as a sign of physical defeat.
Hawking looks at me. He is ready. So I ask him, given that this is the 20th birthday of the book that made him famous, what his own relationship with time is like. 'I have wondered about time all my life,' he says. 'My scientific work has been about time and its beginning, the big bang and black holes. That is why I called my popular book A Brief History of Time. But I have also been very conscious of time in a more personal sense: I have lived most of my life in the expectation of an early death, so time has always been precious to me. I have so much that I want to do. I hate wasting time.'
Is the study of philosophy and theology a waste of time? Hawking, a notorious atheist, looks at his screen, and grimaces. More beeping. 'Yes,' he says, finally. 'Most of it is based on a complete disregard of observational evidence and modern science.' Nuance and a Hawking sentence are, by necessity, strangers. But the flip side of this is that he is licensed for brutality: you get to certain truths, as he sees them, breathtakingly fast, which can leave you feeling almost winded. The speak-your-weight voice - it's surprisingly hard to get your ear in - only adds to this feeling of disempowerment. He lost his own in 1985 after a bout of pneumonia resulted in a tracheotomy, and this one was cobbled together using an Eighties answerphone; he could get a less robotic-sounding voice now, but he is reluctant to change it because it has become so identifiably his.
I've read a lot about the Large Hadron Collider that is being constructed by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva. In Master of the Universe, a Channel 4 film marking the 20th anniversary of A Brief History of Time, more than one scientist suggests that it is only when the LHC, the world's largest particle accelerator, is up and running that Hawking's most famous theories - particularly those that pertain to black holes - might be proven. Does he think this is likely? According to another body of opinion, the LHC's energies will be too low to create micro-black holes. A grimace, a beep, and then: 'I hope the LHC will give us some answers. It might find super-particles: a partner for every ordinary particle. Most exciting for me would be if it found little black holes, for then I would get the Nobel Prize. However, I don't think it is very likely, and I'm not holding my breath.'
Does Hawking feel optimistic about the future of the human race? In the same film, he implies that it would be dangerous for us to put all our eggs in one basket - ie, earth - and that space exploration might be a good idea if we are to maintain the survival of our species. More to the point, does his work make humans seem important, or mighty insignificant? I'm not sure that it's possible to read even the briefest account of his research without a certain sense of futility - of sheer diddyness - sweeping debilitatingly over one. 'The human race may be the only intelligent beings in the galaxy,' he says. 'We have not been visited by aliens, and we have not even picked up their television programmes. It is therefore important that we survive and continue, and the only way we can do that long term is to spread into space.'
Earlier, as I stared at Hawking's fan mail (I was particularly transfixed by the post of a woman who believes she is in love with him; she adorns her envelopes with reproductions of paintings of lovers), Judith showed me a reply Hawking once dictated to a man who wanted to know his feelings about UFOs. It was wryly disdainful: if aliens do visit, he pointed out, we will know about it because it will be very unpleasant, certainly scarier than a lot of pretty lights in the night sky. 'Have you seen Cloverfield [a new alien invasion film]?' Judith asked me, her eyes widening. 'I must get Stephen to see it, because it chimes with his vision exactly.'
Hawking dislikes personal questions, and refuses to answer them. I'd wondered if my next two would get through. But they do. Is he afraid? 'I'm not afraid of death, if that is what you mean. But I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.' How much has motor neurone disease been a galvanising force in his life? It has long been part of his mythology that it was only after his diagnosis aged 21 (he was given just two years to live) that he began to take his work seriously. 'I don't have much positive to say about motor neurone disease, but it taught me not to pity myself because others were worse off, and to get on with what I still could do. I'm happier now than before I developed the condition.' I am stumped by this, properly lost for words, for all that my questions are in front of me. I look at him. He looks at me. Silence. Back to the script. Will I ever be able to go back to 1904 and have a look round? 'If you could go back to 1904, you could only observe; you couldn't change history,' he says. 'But in a sense you can do that anyway because you can make an accurate reconstruction of what happened from historical evidence.' This is basically a no. He refers me, or Judith does, to A Briefer History of Time (which you might call A Brief History of Time for Dummies), in which he posits that wormholes - cosmic short cuts linking points in the universe - remain the best bet for time travel. But the odds are pretty steep against.
I've now asked my six questions. Is there any chance we can talk a bit more? Frantic beeping. 'Until five o'clock,' he says. This is a whole 30 minutes from now. Fantastic. It's only once we're freestyling, however, that I fully grasp how arduous it is to communicate with him. How much did A Brief History of Time and its amazing success - 10m copies sold, 237 weeks on the bestseller lists - change things for him? Hawking gets to work. The minutes tick by - and by. At first, I watch him, politely. After a while, though, I take the opportunity to look around the room. The office is awash with photographs, mostly, one cannot help noticing, of Hawking himself: his graduation photo, a picture of him with ET, several taken with his daughter Lucy. There is a model of the space shuttle and a pen holder in the shape of a TV that says: 'You're a cyber sweetie.' Finally, he answers: 'It seems like yesterday. It changed my life, in that I became world famous. I hadn't expected that. But it hasn't affected my determination to find answers to the really big questions.' But what of those answers? In A Brief History of Time he claimed that he thought it would not be long - 20 years, at most - until the Theory of Everything would be found, and the study of theoretical physics brought to a final conclusion (the Theory of Everything would combine the seemingly impossible-to-combine theories of quantum mechanics and relativity). Four years ago, however, Hawking recanted; at the very least, it was going to take longer than two decades, and it might not happen at all. Is he disappointed by this? Professor Hawking's Bart Simpson clock ticks. I worry, a little, that he is furiously trying to summarise M-theory for me (this is a master theory that unites various super-string theories, and it is where the action in theoretical physics is at right now). But, no. 'The future is never quite what we expect,' he announces, 20 minutes later. 'It would be very boring if it was. We have discovered a whole new layer of complexity.' My time is up, and I must leave none the wiser. We both look a bit exhausted, though only one of us has a right to be - and he, unlike me, will work late tonight, as usual.
A Brief History of Time changed many things. For a start, it transformed the publishing of popular science. When Hawking first took his idea to publishers, most turned it down, believing that such complex ideas would not sell. 'He told us that he couldn't afford to pay our school fees any longer, and so he was going to write a book,' says his daughter Lucy. 'We were like: "OK, Dad." Because he'd written books before, but they were big, weighty tomes. They didn't take off, but then they weren't supposed to.' Suddenly and unexpectedly, though, this new book gained a momentum of its own; Hawking was soon a celebrity and a millionaire. The impact on family life - with his first wife, Jane, Hawking has three children - was immediate. In Master of the Universe, his son Timothy describes how the Hawkings' Cambridge home was suddenly full of 'new people', not least because his father could now afford to pay for a proper care team. These nurses treated the house as if it was their home, which affected 'the balance' of the family; meanwhile, his father became more outgoing, buying Beatles CDs, going to parties.
In Cambridge, I ask Lucy, a writer, about this time (she was doing her A Levels) but she finds only positive things to say about it. 'Our house was always full of people. Scientists would come in and start talking about physics; charismatic healers would want to come and lay on hands. After the book came out, people would react to him in the street, but he'd always attracted a lot of attention; he's always been striking in that he doesn't look like anyone else. I grew up in the Seventies,' Lucy says, 'and attitudes [to disabled people] were very different. You didn't see people out and about in motorised wheelchairs. There was widespread ignorance and fear.' Still, there were moments when, as a teenager, she felt overwhelmed by his achievements. 'I went through a period of thinking: "What's the point of anything? Nothing I do will ever be that good." But I got over that. We've come full circle, really.' Last year, she and her father co-authored a children's book, George's Secret Key to the Universe
I don't think that Lucy Hawking is rewriting history, exactly; but she is, perhaps, so relieved that her father is restored to her that light currently blots out the old darkness. Her parents eventually divorced after 26 years, and in 1995 Hawking married his nurse, Elaine Mason. A period of seeming estrangement from his family followed. At first, this was a standard new-wife drama: wife two was 'controlling', she was 'after his money'. In 1999, an angry Jane Hawking published a weird book about her marriage, Music to Move the Stars, in which, among other things, she described how hard it was to feel desire for his 'Holocaust victim body'. She accused him of being a 'masterly puppeteer' who thought himself omnipotent. Then events took a more sinister turn when tabloid newspapers began reporting allegations that Mason was violent and abusive towards her husband; it was alleged that he regularly turned up at Addenbrooke's hospital with unexplained cuts and bruises, and in 2003 appeared to have been left out in the sun on the hottest day of the year, with the result that he developed sunstroke. Lucy was one of several people who reported her fears about her father to various authorities - though her father himself refused to accuse his wife, reportedly telling his daughter not to interfere in his marriage, and the police dropped their investigation. Finally, in 2005, Hawking and Mason divorced; normal relations with his family were apparently restored. In Hawking's office, I see what looks like a photograph of Hawking and Mason. They both look very happy. Make of that what you will.
For the lay person, perhaps the most confusing thing about Hawking is his reputation. In the press, he is usually hailed as a genius, the greatest scientist since Einstein. Every so often, however, someone will write an article in which they trash this hyperbole, suggesting that if journalists knew anything at all about science, they would realise that he is just one of many drones working in the field. The subtext here is that his fame has more to do with his disability, with the beguiling image of his mind roaming free even as his body wastes to nothing, than with his work. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. Journalists, mostly, do know very little about science. On the other hand, academics are not always generous in their assessments of one another. During the period when the frenzy over Elaine Mason was at its height, the most obscene thing I read was an article in Vanity Fair in which various dons complained how unpleasant it was having to dine at high table with Professor Hawking, what with all his dribbling.
After I visit Hawking, I go to see his friend Bernard Carr, the professor of mathematics and astronomy at Queen Mary, the University of London. Carr has known Hawking since the early Seventies, when he was one of his PhD students. In his miniature office, I remember why it is that academics can be so bitchy: because, as someone once joked, the stakes are so low. Academic salaries are mostly tiny; here, in a tower block on the choking Mile End Road, we're a million miles away from the gleaming structure that houses Hawking's office.
Carr confesses that he was amazed when A Brief History of Time did so well; he was one of the first people to read it, and it didn't strike him as a bestseller. He adds that its success is the major reason why Hawking was able to continue with his career; he could pay his 'army' of helpers, and he could bag more money for his research. So what of Hawking's reputation? Scientists, Carr points out, are not runners: impossible to say who's best. His friend is not Einstein the second. 'But I'd certainly put him in the top 20.' His work on black holes, which linked relativity, quantum theory and thermo dynamics, was 'a beautiful result: so beautiful that it had to be true, though the irony is it still hasn't been verified'. Carr carefully suggests that, in the early days, Hawking's disability allowed him to focus on abstract problems in a way that few academics, who must teach, mark papers and all the rest of it, get the chance to do. 'Science is a scrum. Most of us are working in the scrum. Stephen, by the very nature of his disability, can't work in the scrum.'
A great scientist, then. But what of the man? Does Carr feel that he knows him? The more I think about Hawking, the further he seems to slip from my grasp. Carr strokes his beard for a minute, and then says: 'Well, I've known him for a long time...' I think this is a no, which makes me feel better for myself, but worse for Hawking. It must be lonely in there, at times.
· The two-part series Stephen Hawking: Master of the Universe starts on Channel 4 on Monday 3 March
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