Stephen Hawking: A Life In Science (2002) - Plot & Excerpts
Stephen Hawking painted by Yolanda Sonnabend in 1985.I don’t know how I have the gall to review this book, because I only read half of it. I didn’t read one half and then stop…. rather I read the whole thing, but jumping all the science chapters. I am of an age where I am no longer prepared to do battle with ideas that I will have forgotten a year later, and I’m afraid Stephen Hawking’s work in cosmology comes into this bracket.So, what was left? A biography of a charismatic and brilliant scientist with motor neuron disease, who overcame serious limitations and went on to achieve great things.Even without the science it was a fascinating book. Learning about Hawking’s family, and his father’s ambitions for him, his time at Oxford as an undergraduate, then as a graduate and eventually as a fellow and research scientist at Cambridge. We learn of his accolades and honours, his family life, physical difficulties to be overcome, a medical episode where he almost lost his life, and the enormous success of his most famous book A Short History of Time – and there follows a discussion about its readability that I found most cheering in view of skipping the science chapters in this book!His fame grows enormously. “Hawking enjoyed the adulation and celebrity. He continued to travel around the world. The invitations go give public lectures were becoming overwhelming, and he could have spent his whole time delivering them….In Japan he was received as an idol, getting the sort of reception usually reserved for heads of state or internationally famous rock stars. Back in Cambridge, the volume of mail Hawking received daily had long since become too much for him to handle personally. He continued to receive honorary degrees and international awards."In 1990, Stephen divorced Jane, and married Elaine Mason, who had been his nurse.A film was made based on A Brief History of Time, based on a series of interviews with Hawking. It had a three-million dollar budget, and was released in 1992.In 1997 he made a television series - Stephen Hawking’s UniverseFor me (probably because I skipped the science bits), this book was all about celebrity. I had no idea before I read it that this would be the case. Hawking is profusely admired by people all over the world. On one hand I am happy that a scientist is receiving such general respect, but on the other hand I found it all a bit Hollywood and glitzy. Hawking is more than the sum of his work – perhaps enhanced by the fact that many of us do not understand it. But we love the idea of genius, and people who rise above their limitations – and maybe that kind of celebrity is no bad thing.-----------------------------------------------------------------------Snips from the book I found particularly interesting (a hash of extracts and my notes)(view spoiler)[Hawking won a scholarship to Oxford. As an undergraduate he kept very few notes and possessed only a handful of textbooks. In fact, he was so far ahead of the field that he had become distrustful of many standard textbooks. He was very bored, as his understanding was ahead of what was being taught.Whilst there he met Jane Wilde (then studying in London), and they married. It was then that he was also diagnosed with motor neuron disease.He went on to do post graduate work in Cambridge, and eventually to become a fellow of that university.He was quite outspoken when attending talks give by internationally famous and highly respected figures in the world of physics. Where most young researchers would be happy to accept the words of the great quietly, Hawking would ask deep, often embarrassingly penetrating questions. Instead of alienating him from his seniors, this behaviour, quite rightly, gained him a great deal of respect.He was never interested in observational astronomy. He was always convinced that theoretical physics would be more interesting. To this day he has looked through a telescope nor more than a handful of times.Even in the early 1970s you could see the beginnings of the cult status that has surrounded many of the things Hawking has said and done during his career. In his research Hawking was finding the mathematics of the work increasingly difficult to deal with. The equations for interpreting the physics of black holes are amazingly complex, and by this stage of his illness he could use neither paper and pen, nor a typewriter. Instead he was forced to develop techniques for keep such information in his mind, and ways of manipulating equations without being able to write them down.Despite his disabilities, by the early 1970s, Hawking was beginning to travel extensively. His status as a physicist had grown with his work in collaboration with Penrose, and he was frequently invited to deliver talks and address seminars around the word.At the tender age of thirty-two, he was invited to become a fellow of the Royal Society, one of the youngest scientists to be given such an honour.There are two reasons why Hawking is unlikely ever to receive a Nobel Prize.- There are very few astronomers chosen.-One of the academy’s rules states that a candidate may be considered for a prize only if their discovery can be supported by verifiable experimental or observational evidence. Hawking’s work is, of course, unproved. Although the mathematics of his theories is considered beautiful and elegant, science is still unable even to prove the existence of black holes.Due to the nursing care that Hawking required, he needed to raise more money than he was earning at Cambridge University. There is absolutely no doubt that he could have commanded a huge salary from any university in the world. A number of colleges in the USA would have offered him six-figure sums simply for the prestige accompanying his international fame, not to mention the enormous kudos of cashing in on the important break-throughs he would almost certainly make in the near future. The fact that he remained in Cambridge for a fraction of the salary he could command elsewhere is a great credit to him. The simple fact is that Hawking loved Cambridge. Instead, to raise money, he decided to write a book about his work that would be accessible to the general public, and that he would be able to sell on a larger scale than his previous academic books. The result was “A Brief History of Time”. Hawking wanted to include mathematical equations, but his editor rejected the idea as putting people off. He then suggested a mathematical appendix, which would list the equations forbidden in the text, but Guzzari vetoed the idea. ‘It would terrify people!’ Some publishers were enthusiastic about the book, others thought it would sell very little, but it did fantastically well. By the beginning of 1991 A Brief History of Time had gone to twenty reprints in Britain, was still selling an average of 5,000 copies a month in hardback. The book was leaving the bookshelves faster than the printers could produce new copies… Entering the Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of publication, it rapidly reached number one, where it remained unchallenged throughout the summer. The book had already broken many records and indeed went on to break them all – staying on the list in Britain for a staggering 234 weeks, and notching up British sales in excess of 600,000 in hardback, before Hawking’s publisher Bantam decided to paperback the book in 1995. Hawking’s financial problems were solved.“How does one explain the extraordinary success of a book that so few of its purchasers are able to understand? ….. The mystery of the book’s success is by now almost as baffling and fascinating as the mystery of the origins of the universe” (from The Independent Magazine, April 27, 1991) Within the cloistered world of Cambridge University, Hawking is certainly the most famous and revered academic since Isaac Newton. Today he is tended round the clock by no fewer than ten nurses. He has a sumptuous office in a new building…with a sign on the wall that reads; ‘Yes, I am the centre of the universe.’Adoration and respect are the upside of Hawking’s new found status as some sort of universal guru, but there is also controversy. The backlash (and that is really not too harsh a description) began in the early 1990s, when some of his colleagues within the scientific community began to question openly what they saw as the ridiculous hyperbole that had appeared in the wake of Hawking’s trail-blazing career.----------------------------------------------------The resume given of the authors says that one of them was the Science Editor for GQ, and a journalist at The Express, and the other was an astrophysicist and full time science writer, writing for publications like Nature and The New Scientist. (hide spoiler)]
This bio contains all the key facts of Hawking's life. These sections are a joy to read, particularly the early ones detailing Hawking's youth and his life before his ALS diagnosis. The chapters that focus on Hawking's scientific ideas, however, are a little muddled, and not nearly so compelling--which is disappointing, given that Gribbin is a prolific and experienced science popularizer and has covered these same ideas much better elsewhere. Also, despite this being the most recent edition of the book, it has once again become in part obsolete. A chapter that spends some time speculating about Hawking's views on religion, for instance, is now moot, as in September 2014 Hawking went on the record as an atheist. Since this book was written, Hawking has also separated from his second wife, Elaine Mason. And of course the recent film THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING brings many key moments to life, in some cases changing events or compressing them for heightened dramatic effect. Still, overall, together with the newer edition of Jane Hawking's memoir and with Hawking's own autobiography, this is in an indispensable source to learn about the man.
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