Hawking's father feared son was 'lazy,' secret diaries reveal

For more than sixty years, a father's private doubts about his son lay hidden in a cipher of Greek letters — doubts that history would render almost incomprehensible. The recently decoded diaries of Frank Hawking, discovered during research for an authorised biography, reveal a man who feared his nineteen-year-old son lacked ambition, never imagining that adversity, not comfort, would unlock the mind that would redefine our understanding of the cosmos. In the gap between a parent's worry and a child's eventual becoming lies one of the oldest and most humbling questions: how little we can see o