Stephen Hawking archive opens at Cambridge University

Dr. Stephen Hawking delivering a speech during a lecture as part of a series honoring NASA's 50th Anniversary in 2008 at George Washington University's Morton Auditorium in Washington. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Having been fully catalogued, Stephen Hawking’s scientific and personal archive is now available to the public at Cambridge University Library.

The archive, which contains scientific papers, personal correspondence and mementoes, was donated by the Hawking Family in 2021.

Among the 113 boxes of archive material are tens of thousands of pages relating to Hawking’s work on theoretical physics, as well as early drafts of his bestselling A Brief History of Time. There are also photographs and scripts from films and TV series like The Simpsons, The X Files and Futurama.

In one letter to his parents in 1986, dictated using Hawking’s now famous communication system, he describes it as sounding “a bit like a Dalek with an American accent”.

In another letter to the Royal Opera House in London, Hawking denounced the venue’s lack of facilities for disabled people. He cited the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 1970 and demanded better access to the building.

Other correspondence shows how dedicated the late professor was to preserving the human rights and freedom of movement for his colleagues in the Cold War Soviet Union, including Andrei Sakharov, the physicist, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

Hawking Archivist Susan Gordon, who has spent the past 28 months cataloguing the archive, said: "The archive will be a unique resource for researchers interested in Hawking’s scientific work and academic life, his personal life, popular science communication, disability rights, assistive technology, and celebrity. No single thread sits in isolation, they were interwoven in the tapestry of Hawking’s life, including glimpses into how he felt about their convergence."

Dr Katrina Dean, Cambridge University Library, added: "Working with the archive has impacted the way I think about creative and scientific processes, and what it means to create an original document. It highlights the importance of digital archives and the challenges of curating them".

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