The unusual celebrity of Stephen Hawking

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 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: Hawking Hawking is a full-fledged biography, not an exposé or takedown. But the title accurately captures the book's iconoclastic spirit.

Let me briefly recall the most 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 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. Still, his condition worsened over time. By the late 1970s his speech was difficult to understand and he was in a wheelchair.

Despite his physical challenges, he 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. This remains one of the most outstanding applications of quantum mechanics to gravitation, and continues to inspire hundreds of research papers yearly.

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 made best-seller lists for several years. He became an iconic celebrity, instantly recognisable to millionsall over the world.

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Though it is not an authorised biography, Hawking Hawking is deeply researched and richly sourced. It incorporates fresh interviews with many people who interacted closely with Hawking, including students, collaborators and intellectual rivals.

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. Seife serves up something of the flavour of those difficult and rather esoteric ideas, which are the heart of Hawking's contribution to science, in a way that will not give general readers indigestion but may leave you hungry for more.

Seife chooses to narrate his story using reverse chronology, beginning with Hawking's death and ending with his childhood - 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 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, nor to the logical evolution of ideas. I had to jump around quite a bit, and I imagine that people less familiar with the science could easily lose the thread.

An idealised picture

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, more or less as a trivial consequence. That image is recognisably based on a uniquely inspiring life of achievement, but, as 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 (as opposed to the phenomenology) 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 is not a masterpiece of science or of exposition; its production and promotion was a calculated team effort.

I got to know Hawking well during a week-long conference on cosmology he organised in 1983. By this time his speech was unintelligible at first exposure, but with practice one got to understand it, and more-or-less normal conversations were possible. He and his first wife, Jane Wilde, were gracious hosts to me and my wife, Betsy Devine, when we arrived with our children. He was good-humoured and witty. He enjoyed playing chess with Betsy while baby Mira methodically undid his shoelaces. We became friends.

In 1985, Hawking suffered a serious case of pneumonia, which almost killed him. He had to undergo a tracheotomy, after which speech was impossible. He found a computerised speech device that could translate his limited motions into an artificial but very impressive voice. The system was cumbersome and slow, but the theatrical effect it produced, especially in rehearsed presentations, was mesmerising. This was the Hawking that most of the 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. It also lent a glamorous spotlight to science, which is poorly represented in popular culture. (That television sitcom The Big Bang Theory might be the most prominent recent depiction of science highlights the problem.) And for Stephen, it offered gratification and new experiences.

But: The elevation of tenuous theories of everything - validated through celebrity rather than empirical facts - over the vast, open-ended enterprise of scientifically engaging the physical world was, and is, deeply corrosive. His idol status was also, I think, hard on Stephen. He knew better; less would have been more.

Seife has performed an important service by documenting Hawking's life as it actually happened. It is what a great scientist deserves and should expect.

Hawking Hawking The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity By Charles Seife 388 pp. Basic Books. Available at amazon.com for S$34.30 (hard cover)

• The writer is the author of Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality and the recipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics.