Stephen Hawking, by now, is of course, a phenomenon. However, back in 1967, Stephen was relatively unknown in the corridors of Cambridge. It is known that a dashing young graduate arrived from Oxford in 1962, attired in a black velvet jacket and floppy bow tie to take up a studentship at Cambridge with science’s most celebrated legend, Fred Hoyle. The chemistry didn’t work at all because the physics was wrong.

Stephen fell desperately ill, nourished only by Wagner and an enormous quantity of a special brew. The illness, it turned out, was not terminal, and he continued with great vigour to seek out the singularity that created the universe with a ‘big bang’.

After a long gap, I recall meeting him at Caltech, Pasadena, in 1974, when he was already wheelchair-bound. But at that time, the theory of ‘Hawking radiation’ from the black hole was firmly on its way to making the name of Stephen Hawking a major milestone in the natural sciences. Hawking radiation comes out of an idea that is extraordinarily simple but also extraordinarily elegant and impossibly brilliant — an unbelievable combination of quantum mechanics, gravity and thermodynamics.

I am told that Isaac Newton, one of the most illustrious Lucasian professors, and not a very nice man (in Stephen’s own words in A Brief History of Time), is rather unhappy with this great discovery of his equally famous successor.

On September 25 this year, Stephen Hawking had the last words on a sunny afternoon at the department of applied mathematics and theoretical physics, Cambridge. Hawking is wheeled into a very packed lecture hall, as expected. A serene Stephen just sits there on his wheelchair and goes through, with an unusually cutting, at times even demolishing but always engaging humour, his life and times at DAMTP. After 30 years, Hawking is formally stepping down from his Lucasian Chair. I believe Isaac Newton is rather relieved, because in those Newtonian days, nobody retired but just died. And it so happened that Newton lived for a very, very long time.

In the evening, the great lower hall of King’s College, Cambridge, was packed to full for a banquet celebrating 50 years of the DAMTP. Everyone came, the tune was distinctly mathematical. To my surprise, and indeed pleasure, Stephen Hawking arrived attired in an unusually long sweater. His wheelchair was at the extreme end of the hall.

While going out, I managed to whip up enough courage to talk to him (he can hear but not talk) while his young colleagues (helping hands) sat around. I reminded him of the glorious days in Caltech in 1974 and, of course, of the inimitable Richard Feynman. The young lady accompanying him must have thought that I was talking of something that happened a very long time ago.

Coming out, I saw King’s Chapel basking in faint, ethereal moonlight, stars studding the cosmos above — timeless, yet with a cataclysmic beginning. I had a quiet moment to myself; 1974 is, after all, the year of the announcement of Hawking radiation.

The world, or shall we say the universe, would never be the same again.