Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  In the meantime, the day after arriving back from Moscow, Hawking had set off for Philadelphia to collect an award from the Franklin Institute, after which he was invited to deliver a seminar at Drexel University. He recounts the story thus:

  I spent most of the seminar talking about the problems of the inflationary model, just as in Moscow, but at the end I mentioned Linde’s idea of slow symmetry-breaking and my corrections to it. In the audience was a young assistant professor from the University of Pennsylvania, Paul Steinhardt. He talked to me afterward about inflation. The following February, he sent me a paper by himself and a student, Andreas Albrecht, in which they proposed something very similar to Linde’s idea of slow symmetry-breaking. He later told me he didn’t remember me describing Linde’s ideas and he had seen Linde’s paper only when they had nearly finished their own.3

  When Steinhardt discovered what Hawking had written about him, he was understandably furious. The potential damage to his career was immeasurable. At the time, Steinhardt was a junior professor, while Hawking was Lucasian Professor at Cambridge and widely acknowledged as one of the most eminent physicists in the world. The whole incident was reminiscent of the conflict, early in the eighteenth century, between the relatively unknown mathematician Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton over who had invented the calculus. However, the inclusion of this passage in Hawking’s best-selling book was not the beginning of the story. The arguments had started back in 1982 after a physics workshop organized by Hawking in Cambridge.

  Mike Turner and John Barrow, who had been at the workshop, showed Hawking their draft summary of the meeting and suggested that some remarks about the Linde and Albrecht-Steinhardt discovery of “new inflation” could be included. Hawking took exception to the proposed co-credit. Instead of confronting Steinhardt or Albrecht directly, he suggested to Turner and Barrow that they either delete their names or add a reference to a Hawking-Moss paper, crediting it with co-discovery of “new inflation.”

  Hawking’s reasons for taking this attitude were, first, that he claimed (incorrectly) that the Steinhardt-Albrecht paper had appeared in print a full six months after Linde’s, and, second, that he had discussed Linde’s theory at a seminar a few months earlier, a seminar which Steinhardt and Albrecht had been to as well. Angered by Hawking’s attitude, Turner and Barrow alerted Steinhardt and Albrecht to the conflict and simultaneously decided, at a risk to themselves, not to follow through with Hawking’s request.

  Steinhardt wrote to Hawking explaining his position and sent him notebooks and letters that verified that his work had already been under way before Hawking’s talk the previous October. He also stated quite categorically that he had, in any case, no recollection of Hawking mentioning Linde’s ideas at the seminar. Most of all, Steinhardt was incensed by the fact that Hawking had gone behind their backs and that if he had doubts about the validity of their work he should have raised the matter openly. He realized that Hawking was causing this dispute not so much to promote his own interests as to support his friend Linde, but this did not in any way excuse his behavior.

  Hawking wrote back to Steinhardt to say that he had meant nothing by his remarks to Turner and Barrow and that he fully accepted that the Albrecht-Steinhardt work was independent of Linde’s. He even concluded his letter with a friendly wish that they might work together on future projects, making it clear that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was closed.

  This was in 1982, before Hawking had begun to write A Brief History of Time. It came as quite a surprise, therefore, when in 1988, with Hawking’s book on the best-sellers’ list, Steinhardt was informed of the offending passage. By then Steinhardt had heard rumors that Hawking had mentioned the controversy in private conversations over the years and had evidently not let the matter lie as he had implied in his letter to Steinhardt in 1982. However, it was the circumstances in which Steinhardt discovered Hawking’s continued pursuit of the matter that really caused offense. Steinhardt had requested some information on obtaining a National Science Foundation grant, and it was the funding officer who pointed out the offending section in Hawking’s book. Needless to say, there was no further discussion of National Science Foundation grants on that occasion.

  Steinhardt had to defend his reputation. Hawking’s behavior was now having a potentially seriously damaging effect on his career. He decided to substantiate his claims about the Drexel seminar by going through his old notes and obtaining independent verification. Instead, he stumbled upon something much more useful—a videotape of the 1981 seminar. Copying the tape with independent witnesses at every stage, he sent a copy to Hawking in Cambridge and a copy to Bantam in New York, by express mail. Several months passed before Hawking responded to Steinhardt’s challenge. This time he wrote to say that the offending text in A Brief History of Time would be changed in the next edition and that the publishers had drafted a press release to announce the change. However, he neither apologized to Steinhardt for the damage his actions had caused nor suggested that his original version had been in any way wrong. It was only after several of Hawking’s colleagues around the world began to make it clear they thought he was wrong that he relented.

  Chief among Steinhardt’s supporters was Mike Turner at Fermilab. He found himself in a very awkward position over the whole affair. He was friendly with both men but saw Hawking’s actions as unjust. Finally, at a meeting in Santa Barbara in 1988, Hawking encountered Turner and asked, “Are you ever going to speak to me again?” Still angry over the incident, Turner suggested that Hawking could do more to salve the wounds he had caused. In an effort to lay the matter to rest, Hawking wrote a letter to Physics Today, which was published in the February 1990 issue, in which he said he was sure that the two teams had been working independently on new inflation and that he was sorry if his account of the incident had been misinterpreted by the readers of his book.

  As far as both parties are concerned, the matter is now closed, but Hawking’s behavior on this occasion was patently wrong. The darker aspect of his famous stubbornness had overridden fairness. Steinhardt is still smarting from the incident, which has undoubtedly and quite wrongly damaged his career and caused him totally unnecessary emotional distress. However, as evidenced by the Leibniz-Newton conflict, such disagreements and wrangles are far from uncommon in the history of science. Characters like Hawking do keep the world of science alive and energized by their ideas and imaginations, but the less creative aspects of such strong personalities can sometimes head off at personal tangents with an intensity parallel to their more creative contributions.

  Within weeks of A Brief History of Time entering the American best-seller list, the film rights for the book were snapped up. An ex-ABC news producer by the name of Gordon Freedman was quick to see the potential of Hawking’s book as a film. He also happened to share the same agent as Hawking, Al Zuckerman. Freedman and Zuckerman did a deal and the film rights were sold.

  The problem for Freedman was what he was then going to do with the acquisition. He did not want to make a straight documentary of Hawking’s life and work—there had been too many of these already, and they had covered the ground quite effectively. On the other hand, he felt there was plenty of scope in the ideas described in the book to produce a film that explored the more esoteric aspects of Hawking’s work as well as getting across the essential human-interest angle. A series of coincidences then occurred which eventually led to a viable project.

  Freedman went to Anglia Television in Britain. Anglia is based in Norwich, which is close enough to Cambridge for Hawking to be considered a local celebrity. Only a matter of weeks earlier, an Anglia TV producer, David Hickman, had approached the commissioning editors with the idea of making a film about Stephen Hawking. Rival broadcasters at BBC East, also based in Norwich, had made the award-winning Master of the Universe, and Hickman thought that they should make a program that tackled the subject in a different way from that of the BBC team. Stirred by the offer from Freedman in the States and by H
ickman’s proposal, Anglia became interested in the concept and agreed to take on the Freedman project with Hickman as producer and Freedman as executive producer.

  A year passed, during which the producers worked out how they would raise the finances for their project. The original concept was a large-budget TV special, a “Super-Horizon,”* as Hickman described it. For that they would need big bucks. After lunch in London with Caroline Thomson, then commissioning editor of science programs at Channel 4, the network expressed interest in the project but could not foot the entire bill. At this point, Freedman decided to try the big broadcasters in the States. Instead of approaching them directly, he went first to Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin Entertainment, in Los Angeles.

  Spielberg had been following Hawking’s work for many years and, with an eye on the commercial worth of the project, was immediately interested in the idea of helping to increase public awareness of what Hawking was trying to say in A Brief History of Time. Spielberg is another of those who sees Hawking as the late twentieth century’s answer to Albert Einstein and has felt a deep fascination with things extraterrestrial from a very early age. It was Spielberg’s involvement that really brought the scheme into high profile and secured the essential finances needed to bring the project to fruition.

  Spielberg and Hawking actually met early in 1990 on the Universal lot at Amblin Studios in Los Angeles, where they posed together for photographers and chatted for over ninety minutes in the Californian sunshine. Expressing a mutual admiration, they apparently got on very well. Hawking had enjoyed E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He even suggested jokingly that their film should be called Back to the Future 4. For his part, Spielberg had been greatly taken by A Brief History of Time. According to one journalist, observers at the meeting reported that it was Hawking who was the center of attention—quite a feat in Hollywood, where Spielberg is perceived as a demigod.

  In the same month that Freedman had contacted Amblin, a filmmaker by the name of Errol Morris had approached them with an idea for a new film. Morris had written and directed the critically successful and controversial The Thin Blue Line, a film about an alleged cop-killer who was wrongly imprisoned after an incident in Dallas. Morris’s idea was to make a film about the mystery surrounding what had happened to Einstein’s brain after his death. When the Hawking proposal turned up, Spielberg suggested that Morris might like to look at the idea with a view to directing the project.

  Morris had been aware of Hawking’s work since his student days, when he had studied philosophy of science at Princeton and had attended lectures given by the eminent American physicist John Wheeler, who had first applied the term “black hole” in an astronomical context. David Hickman has suggested that Morris was also interested in the project because, at a certain level, he saw parallels between Randall Adams, the protagonist in The Thin Blue Line, and Stephen Hawking. Adams was trapped in a situation that was entirely out of his control, caught up in a web of events over which he had little influence. In the same way Hawking, trapped in a crippled body, is physically ensnared but has mentally transcended this barrier to achieve greatness. Morris is inherently fascinated by such themes and uses them as a jumping-off point for his iconoclastic movies.

  By the end of 1989, with Spielberg’s involvement, NBC in America had become interested. The president of the Entertainment Division of the network was a great admirer of The Thin Blue Line and was sold on the idea almost immediately. NBC eventually became the film’s major financial contributor. With the interest of two networks under his belt, Freedman then decided to try Japanese television. The idea of a TV special about Hawking backed by Spielberg was very appealing to the Japanese, and Tokyo Broadcasting took very little convincing. The project now had the funding it needed. Between the three networks, the producers had a budget of three million dollars. They could effectively make the film they wanted.

  Errol Morris’s approach was to build the film around a series of interviews, recording much more footage than is used in the final version. Cutting this interview material to perhaps half its original length, he then began to construct visual images around what remained. In the first stage of the project, researchers drew up a list of Hawking’s friends, family, and colleagues from around the world who they thought might be interested in taking part in the project. However, they were soon surprised to discover that there were many people who did not want to be in the film.

  Hickman believes there is some resistance to media people in Cambridge. Like Peter Guzzardi, he felt that some of Hawking’s students—as well as more senior colleagues—resented the idea of serious scientific work being oversimplified. He also detected that, despite the runaway success of A Brief History of Time, there was a definite closing of ranks in certain quarters at the suggestion of a commercial film being made around Hawking’s ideas.

  “Cambridge University is a very tight community,” he said. “There are numerous rivalries, jealousies, animosities. Despite the fact that the interviews were totally unscripted (they could talk about what they had for breakfast if they wanted), there was an undoubted feeling that we were a News of the World on screen.”

  Fortunately for the producers, however, there were plenty more interested participants than those suffering from delusions that they were being coerced into something slightly unsavory.

  In January 1990, sound stages at Elstree Studios were block-booked for two weeks. The first people to move in were the set designers. Morris had the idea that he would give the designer the name of an interviewee and a rough idea of his or her relationship with Hawking, and the designer would then go away and create individual sets for each interviewee to be filmed in. Sometimes the set had absolutely no relevance to the subject; for other interviews it matched the topic of the interview.

  As the interviews were unscripted, Morris would often say to the interviewee, “Look, I don’t really know how to start this interview. Why don’t you just tell me some stories?” He has what he calls the two-minute rule: “If you give people two minutes, they’ll show you how crazy they are.”

  For A Brief History of Time they conducted over thirty interviews in thirteen days at Elstree, using thirty-three different sets. Interviewees included Dennis Sciama, Dr. Robert Berman, Isobel Hawking, friends from school and undergraduate days, and co-workers at the DAMTP such as Gary Gibbons. However, star billing was reserved for Stephen Hawking himself.

  The most important set at Elstree during the fortnight of filming was a reconstruction of Hawking’s office at the DAMTP. No effort was spared in re-creating the room in intimate detail. Even Hawking was bemused by Morris’s attention to minutiae.

  “I’m surprised they went to all that trouble because most people wouldn’t have known if it had been different,”4 he said.

  Morris had wondered about Hawking’s fascination with Marilyn Monroe. Hawking smiled and explained that he had very much enjoyed Some Like It Hot, and ever since then, his family and friends had insisted on buying him Marilyn merchandise at every opportunity: posters from Lucy and his secretary, a Marilyn bag from Timothy, and a towel from Jane. “I suppose you could say she was a model of the Universe,”5 he had joked.

  Morris had also decided to have built a reproduction of Hawking’s wheelchair, accurate to the last detail of the license plate, for when he could not make a shoot. Using “macro-filming” techniques, he could get extreme close-ups of the chromework and leather, filling the screen as an image to accompany an interview on voice-over. According to Hickman, Hawking’s childhood home at 14 Hillside Road was filmed almost brick by brick.

  Hawking himself was shot against a blue screen so that his image could be projected onto any backdrop the director chose. The original intention was to have Hawking narrate relevant parts of the film using his voice synthesizer. However, it soon became clear that the harshness of the voice was irritating after a while when used as a voice-over. Consequently, Morris decided against the idea, and the viewer hears Hawking’s voice
only when he is actually talking to the camera. The use of blue-screen filming gives the director enormous flexibility. “I can place Stephen Hawking where he belongs, in a mental landscape rather than a real one,”6 Morris has said.

  What the viewer does not see, however, are astronauts falling into black holes or other such science-documentary clichés. As Hickman points out, “No one has seen a black hole—they are theoretical objects as far as we know. The subject matter of this film lies in the realms of the imagination.”

  With a three-million-dollar budget, Hickman, Freedman, and Morris could call on the very best people in the business to handle design, lighting, cinematography, sound production, and other essential technical support. The background staff responsible for transforming Morris’s ideas into a viable product had impeccable credentials; between them they had worked on over a dozen major Hollywood films, including Edward Scissorhands, Batman II, American Gigolo, and Wild at Heart. The American composer Philip Glass was commissioned to write the film score, his polyrhythmic electronic music acting as a perfect complement to Morris’s visual acrobatics.

  Hickman says that the film is really about God and time and not so much about scientific investigation or Hawking’s disabilities:

  We are far more interested in the concepts Stephen has tried to portray in his book than in producing a straight science documentary asking questions like “What is the future of cosmology?” The most exciting thing about cosmology is the fact that it interfaces metaphysics and conventional science. It’s very interesting that Stephen has attracted a lot of attention over the religious aspects of his work, as well as the fact that he is close to a number of physicists with deep theological concerns, such as Don Page.