Stephen Hawking's unusual celebrity

Stephen Hawking was, by a wide margin, the best-known figure from the world of science from the mid-1980s until his death in 2018. Hawking Hawking, by the accomplished science journalist and historian Charles Seife, is a tough-minded portrait of the theoretical physicist. Taken literally, though, the book’s provocative title is misleading: it is a full-fledged biography, not an exposé or takedown. But the title accurately captures the book’s iconoclastic spirit. This is not another contribution to the vast Hawking hagiography.
 
Let me briefly recall the basic facts of Hawking’s life. In 1942 he was born in Oxford, England, into an accomplished medical and academic family. He received his undergraduate degree from Oxford and got his PhD from Cambridge in 1966, largely based on his mathematical proof that showed that an expanding universe must begin in a singularity — the singularity theorem.

 
As early as 1963 he began to develop symptoms of motor neurone disease, also known as ALS. This disease typically runs a fatal course within a few years, but Hawking’s illness developed slowly. By the late 1970s his speech was difficult to understand and he was in a wheelchair. Despite his physical challenges Hawking continued to produce good work in physics, including most notably his startling theoretical demonstration, in 1974, that black holes should spontaneously radiate — a phenomenon that came to be known as Hawking radiation.
 

In 1979 Hawking was appointed to the Lucasian professorship at Cambridge, a position previously occupied by Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage and Paul Dirac. A Brief History of Time, Hawking’s presentation of his work for a popular audience, appeared in 1988 and it made the best-seller lists for several years. Stephen Hawking became an iconic celebrity, instantly recognisable to millions if not billions of people all over the world.

 
This is a book meant for general readers. It describes the cultural and the broad scientific context of Hawking’s work, and its reception, but it does not provide self-contained accounts of the work itself. If you want to learn what singularity theorems, Hawking radiation or the no-boundary proposal is all about, you will have to look elsewhere.
 
It’s worth noting Mr Seife’s odd choice to narrate his story using reverse chronology. He begins, thus, with Hawking’s death and ends with his childhood. It’s an unusual but stimulating structure. Indeed, the phenomenon of a nearly “locked-in,” physically helpless and non-communicative figure, having inspired the adulation of millions for his intellectual mastery over the universe, being interred next to Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey, is so extraordinary that unravelling step by step the question of “How did this happen?” might keep you turning the pages. But the time-reversed narrative is not well matched to how readers usually understand stories.

 
In the popular imagination Hawking was a transcendent scientist and a pure spirit who courageously overcame profound physical disabilities while he also happened to become a publishing sensation and a performance icon. But, as Mr Seife amply documents, it paints an idealised picture. Hawking did important work in two splendid but rather speculative, unworldly branches of theoretical physics, namely the mathematical theories of black holes and of Big Bang cosmology. He most certainly did not pioneer a “Theory of Everything,” as was often reported, nor did practising physicists hang onto his every pronouncement. He did his best work well before the worst of his physical deterioration, and his personal life was in parts problematic. A Brief History of Time, his runaway hit, is not a masterpiece of science or of exposition; and its production and promotion was a calculated team effort.

 
I got to know Hawking well during a weeklong conference on cosmology he organised (together with Gary Gibbons) in 1983. By this time his speech was unintelligible, but with a bit of practice one got to understand it. He was a good-humoured and witty person. At one point, he enjoyed playing chess with my wife Betsy while baby Mira methodically undid his shoelaces. We became family friends. The conference proved to be a milestone, where the central ideas of inflationary cosmology came together and axion cosmology was born.
 
In 1985 Hawking suffered a serious case of pneumonia. He had to undergo a tracheotomy, after which speech was impossible. He eventually found a computerised speech device that could translate his limited motions into an artificial but very impressive voice. The system was cumbersome, but the theatrical effect it produced, especially in rehearsed presentations on an open stage, was mesmerising. This was the version of Hawking that most of his public got to know.

 
The effects of Hawking’s celebrity were complicated, too.
 
On the positive side: It focused attention on his courage and perseverance in the face of terrible adversity, which can serve as an inspiration to everyone. It also lent glamour and the spotlight to science, which is poorly represented in popular culture. (That the television sitcom The Big Bang Theory might be the most prominent recent depiction of science highlights the problem.)
 
The elevation of tenuous “Theories of Everything” — validated through celebrity rather than by empirical facts — over the vast, open-ended enterprise of engaging the physical world scientifically was, and is, deeply corrosive. Mr Seife has performed an important service by documenting Stephen Hawking’s life as it actually happened. It is what a great scientist deserves.

 
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