I've sometimes wondered—had to wonder, being in no position to judge—whether Stephen Hawking's status as a best-selling author, and the difficult circumstances of his life, have caused the public to overrate his contributions to science. Now I see there is a book that takes up this question, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, by Charles Seife, reviewed here by the estimable James Gleick. Short answer to my question is, as the title suggests, Yes, Hawking has been successfully hawked to the public as a scientific genius. It wasn't perhaps a real hard sell. There's more romance to some scientific topics than others, and Hawking's interests, cosmology and black holes, are among the sexiest. It also helps to have some kind of "hook," a personal tic or oddity that captures attention. With Einstein, the hair, suggesting he was too lost in ruminations and calculations to go to the barber. And it's true, so far as my understanding extends, that relativity "came out of his head" rather than being derived from the process one learns about in school concerning hypotheses that are then tested by experimentation, &c. Einstein just figured out in his head what must be true, and it seemed super weird, but the experimenters confirmed he was right: a triumph of pure thought.
Hawking's analogous trait would have been the disease—motor neuron disease to Brits but what we Americans call Lou Gehrig's Disease—that disabled him to such a degree that any image of him might conjure the phrase "pure thought." His body couldn't do much besides keep his brain alive. That such a man should then be the successor to Newton and Einstein is a pretty good story—so good as to be readily believed even though the truth is in quite another direction. It's not that Hawking wasn't a good scientist. The work he is known for, however, was achieved in the 1960s, before disease had crippled his body, and it's probably the case that disability hindered his scientific work: by 1966 he could no longer write or type, and even the math that I can do is abetted considerably by writing, drawing, diagramming, doodling. Hawking could not hold a pencil. The notion that his genius was a kind of compensation for having been stricken with a dreadful disease is mostly a heap of rubbish. What might be thought of as the Stephen Hawking Industry arose at the intersection of science, which he was good at, and his need to support a "life style" that required, for example, round-the-clock nursing attention, personal aides, medical devices and gadgetry, a voice box synthesizer—the comparatively healthy cannot begin to fathom what was required to sustain him. Perhaps the most memorable sentence of Gleick's review states that, while Hawking "considered suicide," he "had no way to accomplish it." He wasn't well enough to start a car in a garage, jump from a roof, shoot himself, cut his wrists, swallow pills or poison. Instead, he participated, to a degree, in the monetizing of celebrity. He might have told interviewers that he was no Newton or Einstein, but he cultivated these kinds of comparisons, and his "modesty" could be viewed as part of the campaign.
A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, is chiefly responsible for having created a science superstar. More than 25 million copies have sold, and it has generated the predictable commercial offspring—a movie, an opera, a tenth anniversary edition, an expanded and illustrated edition, an abridged sequel called A Briefer History of Time. Hawking's original 100-page manuscript was, in Gleick's summary of Seife's assessment, dull and "uneven," alternately assuming the reader to be a physicist and a middle school student. It was then improved considerably, less by Hawking than by his graduate students and editors at Bantam. The editing was done with an eye on putting Hawking, not science, at the center. Ka-ching!
Some biographies are in the mode of Life-of-the-Saintly-Genius, and another variety takes an equal pleasure in knocking down the scaffolding on which some supposed giant is perched. This one, assuming Gleick's review of it to be apt, corrects an established version resembling the former tendency without descending into the latter pit. Hawking, in the revision, is famous for the wrong reasons, which is not to say that he was a fraud or that his life's story isn't full of human interest.
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