Beyond the Night Sky - Music for Stephen Hawking

This is the music commissioned from composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad for Stephen Hawking's 75th Birthday. It's sung here by the choir of Gonville and Caius Cambridge, the college where he was a fellow for over 50 years. 

It was moving to see the familiar streets of central Cambridge crowded yesterday to say goodbye to one of the city's heroes. I lived in Cambridge for 14 years in the mid 1970's and the late 1990's and, throughout that time, Professor Stephen Hawking was a well known figure about the city. I remember the days when we used to hurry out of the evening service at Holy Trinity to get to the 8pm debate at Great Saint Mary's where he was an occasional attender, apparently interested in the intersection of science and religion though not a religious believer himself. 

I read with fascination A Brief History of Time and managed not to get completely lost until the chapter on string theory. He was somebody who made physics accessible and interesting. He inspired many through his humanity, doing small things globally to encourage young people to achieve their potential and championing the NHS and affordable, accessible university education, sometimes at cost to himself as when he turned down a knighthood.

It was impossible not to be moved by the power of his mind, by his courage and lack of self-regard and by his ability to communicate using a ready sense of humour - no mean feat through a synthesised voice. His timing was impeccable.

It seemed to me very apt that one of the readings chosen for his funeral was The Death of Socrates from Plato's Apology 40.  It was read by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and it reflects the courtesy of the atheist to the religious believer and vice versa so typified in Prof. Hawking's life.

'Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good; for one of two things — either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain.

For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others.

Now if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

But if death is the journey to another place, and there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges, can be greater than this?.

What would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer?

Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again...

Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next.'

Translation Richard Jebb

This passage demonstrates respect for the view that there is no life beyond this life and explains why it is possible to be not just reconciled but inspired by this belief. It equally captures the joy of belief in opportunity and continued existence beyond this life so important in Christianity and other religions. And it presents us with freedom of choice.

A great life and a personality who 'broke boundaries with his mind' and boundaries not just in cosmology but of the limitations of divisions between human beings.