Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  During the early 1990s Hawking set about adding to his literary canon with a collection of other books. First came the book-of-the-film-of-the-book—The Companion to A Brief History of Time, which was based on the script of the Errol Morris film A Brief History of Time broadcast in 1992, a production that was itself partly based on Hawking’s original book. Next came a collection of essays called Black Holes and Baby Universes, which contained a mixture of separate short pieces covering a range of subjects from technical lectures to descriptions of the author’s personal life and views on religion and philosophy. Some time later, in 1996, a completely new version of A Brief History of Time appeared, called The Illustrated A Brief History of Time. This was not merely an illustrated version of the 1988 original but a very different book, which, although based on the original manuscript, was far more accessible. To date, this has sold an estimated 100,000 copies in hardback.

  But by far the most significant commercial addition to Hawking’s literary canon was the publication, late in 2001, of The Universe in a Nutshell. In this book, Hawking considered many of the themes he had covered in A Brief History of Time but attempted to deal with them in clearer terms aimed squarely at a lay audience.

  The responses to this book were mixed. It certainly did well in the marketplace (although not in quite the same league as A Brief History of Time). Many found The Universe in a Nutshell far more approachable than Hawking’s earlier work, yet some found little merit in it. The Guardian’s reviewer, Jon Turney, declared “The Universe in a Nutshell is more episodic than A Brief History of Time, but is mainly a commentary on the same ideas.”3

  The fact that the early 1990s saw the start of a Hawking industry (of which the original version of this book was a significant part) should come as no surprise. The man had become an international celebrity and his personal life was as fascinating to the general public as his work had been for many years to the scientifically inclined. And Hawking was quick to place himself at the very center of this process. But at the same time there was a noticeable iciness toward journalists and writers on the part of many of his friends and students, who began to resent the intrusion of fame into the equation. And is not difficult to see why.

  Hawking himself had fallen into a trap of his own making, ensnared by his own success. On the one hand, he wanted to exploit his fame and success, but on the other he genuinely did not want it to interfere with his work. So began a difficult juggling act—keeping up a public persona, keeping the books flowing, but at the same time maintaining his position at the cutting edge of his field.

  Hawking may appear to possess superhuman abilities as a scientist and as a survivor, but he could not keep all the balls in the air at once, and many of those who know him and work with him would admit that his scientific work has indeed suffered and that Stephen Hawking no longer leads but follows closely behind other less famous innovators.

  Hawking knew early on that he could use A Brief History of Time as a stepping stone rather than leaving it as an end in itself. From the moment the book reached a global audience, he rightly exploited the phenomenon he had created and was determined to gain as much as he could from it. This manifested itself in a number of ways. Some of the things Hawking has done with his fame are purely selfish, others are totally altruistic, and some he has done simply for fun.

  On Christmas Day 1992, he appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. He revealed little about his life that was not already known but he came across well, portraying his charm and charisma despite the mechanical sound of his voice. He talked about the ways in which he dealt with his illness and how he had succeeded in his varied career despite the affliction of ALS, hinting that in some respects it had helped him by allowing him to focus on his thoughts without the distraction of administration and playing a practical role in his domestic life. His choice of music was a fairly predictable confection that included Beethoven, Brahms, his beloved Wagner, and the Beatles.

  The following spring, Hawking was approached by BT (British Telecommunications) to star in a new set of commercials being produced for them by Saatchi and Saatchi (ironically, the company that had created the winning publicity campaigns for a Tory party that Hawking absolutely detests). The message was built around the theme of the importance of communicating, even when it is very difficult to do so, and the 90-second ads showed Hawking in various impressive locations with his voice-over stating how important the ability to communicate is to humanity and how talking had been the means by which everything had been achieved in history, thereby implying that we should all invest more in the benefits to be gained from talking to others on the telephone. BT has never disclosed how much Hawking was paid for his services, but they have been happy to repeat the message that Stephen was tailor-made for the job. “Hawking is a perfect example of someone who lives to communicate. He acts as a very powerful metaphor for BT.”4

  Although he made a significant sum from these advertisements, far more important for Hawking was the exposure they afforded him. Although he constantly claims that he is not a media animal and resents the intrusion of publicity into his life and the demands it entails, he loves the attention he gets from appearing on millions of television screens. Among the many paradoxes that make up Stephen Hawking, one is the fact that he simultaneously shuns and courts the attention of the media, especially television and film. He genuinely feels that the crescendo of celebrity that followed the success of A Brief History of Time has damaged what, at the core of his being, is most important to him—his scientific work; but at the same time his not-inconsiderable ego propels him into more activities that will heighten his profile and take him away from the DAMTP. It was known in media circles that Hawking was desperately keen to acquire his own television show, and the BT adverts were an important stepping stone in this direction. In the autumn of 1997, almost five years after those ads, he achieved his dream when a new series, Stephen Hawking’s Universe, was broadcast for the first time. If fame was his motivation for doing the series of ads, then it worked, because for a surprising number of people in Britain, Hawking is the man from the BT ads first, the author of A Brief History of Time second, and one of the world’s leading physicists third. For a depressingly large number, he is only the first of these.

  In the summer of 1995, riding on the crest of this new wave of fame, Hawking accepted an invitation to deliver a lecture at the Royal Albert Hall. By doing this he was again following in the footsteps of the scientist with whom he is most frequently identified—Albert Einstein. As a refugee from Nazi Germany, Einstein gave a public lecture at the Albert Hall in London when he lived in England briefly during 1933. Hawking’s was the best-attended public physics lecture delivered in Britain since that occasion, easily filling the 5,000-seat arena; on the pavements outside, scalpers sold tickets for the event at inflated prices to fans who had not managed to obtain them through official means. In typical fashion, Hawking decided to end the lecture on a controversial note similar to the way he ended his best-selling book, by discussing the question of God’s role in the mechanisms that govern the universe. He concluded, “God still has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

  Although Hawking could have made a fortune from the lecture, and indeed could command almost any price to conduct a public lecture tour anywhere in the world, he provided his services for the Albert Hall event free and only agreed to be involved because the proceeds were given over to a charity concerned with motor neuron disease. And indeed, Hawking’s greatest redeeming quality since the success of his literary career has been the fact that as his fame has soared, he has exploited it as much to help others as to help himself.

  Throughout the 1990s, Hawking has made every effort to help charities he believes in to gain publicity by association with his name. Quite naturally, he is most keen to help charities dealing with physical disability and in particular motor neuron disease. He has been vociferous in his efforts. Writing to The Times in March 1994, he attacked the establishment by saying that disabled
people

  . . . face great obstacles when they want to take part in any normal activities like going to the theatre or cinema, or eating in restaurants. As I know only too well, very few London theatres and cinemas have wheelchair places. If there were such discrimination against blacks or women there would be a public outcry.5

  But although he has endorsed national campaigns and protests, he has also worked on a local level, pushing the Cambridge Council into providing local residents with better access to theaters, museums, libraries, and other public places and generally helping to raise awareness of the special needs of physically handicapped people.

  He also firmly believes that the technology now available to him through the money he has earned as an author should be made available to other seriously disabled people via the NHS and claims that reliance upon charity (and in his case good fortune) is “simply not good enough.” To help the plight of others who have been paralyzed either through accidents or diseases such as ALS, Hawking has spearheaded several campaigns to generate funds. Part of this effort involved his endorsing an exhibition of the potential future technology associated with disability, called Speak to Me, based at the Science Museum in London. Merely having Hawking’s name associated with the exhibition and having him open it guaranteed its success, attracting the interest of the media and a public who would normally not be drawn to so esoteric an exhibition.

  Shortly afterward, he went on to support a charity called Aspire (Appeal for the Professor of Disability and Technology), whose aim was to create a seat at University College London devoted entirely to research into technology to be used by the disabled. Hawking said of the project:

  The scope is enormous. There are over six million disabled people in this country, some very disabled like me, and a large proportion of these can be helped. Disabled people are people first and disabled second. They should not be condemned to a lifetime sentence of solitary confinement without the power to move them or communicate with the outside world.6

  When the Civil Rights Bill in Britain eventually fell upon stony ground in 1994, Hawking urged people to react by opposing the government, saying, “I don’t think any disabled person should vote for the present government unless they do something to atone for the shabby way they killed the Civil Rights Bill.”7

  But at the same time as he has been furthering his own career and helping others, he has had some fun. In 1993, while he was visiting the set of Star Trek, the Next Generation, Hawking let slip to the executives taking him around the Enterprise that he had always fantasized about appearing in an episode of the program. No sooner was it mentioned than the producers managed to work him into the script in a cameo role for an episode being filmed at the time. In this, his first and only dramatic role to date, Hawking appeared on the holodeck of the USS Enterprise to play poker with Data, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein. Afterward, one of the executives who had arranged for Hawking to appear said, “He may admire the show but we are bigger fans of his.”8

  Not surprisingly, Hawking was soon in demand within the entertainment world. Pink Floyd sampled him talking for their album The Division Bell; and in OK Computer, released in the summer of 1997, Radiohead composed a musical collage built around Hawking reading from a pre-prepared script the band had written for him.

  On the Internet, Hawking also attracts a great deal of attention from surfers not only interested in physics and the extreme edge of cosmological research but also fascinated by his celebrity status, his relationship with science fiction and now even popular music. There are literally thousands of Stephen Hawking and A Brief History of Time sites on the World Wide Web, and through Internet forums it is remarkably easy to find people around the world at any time of the night or day happy to discuss obscure aspects of the professor’s work and thoughts. Not all of these are trivial fan websites and forums—there is the official Stephen Hawking website and lectures published by Hawking supporters and detractors. These range from other scientists working in allied fields, through producers and journalists putting their interviews and scripts online, to vigorous opponents of Hawking’s religious and philosophical views publishing online arguments refuting his statements and offering alternatives to his ideas.

  Within the cloistered world of Cambridge University, Hawking is certainly the most famous and revered academic since Isaac Newton. Today he is tended around the clock by no fewer than ten nurses. He has a sumptuous office in a new building on the west side of Cambridge. Here he has had new pictures and posters put on the walls including a mock-up poster that shows Marilyn Monroe leaning against a Cadillac with Hawking in his wheelchair beside her as though they are about to go out on date together. He also has a sign on the wall that reads “Yes, I am the center of the universe.” Pictures of his three children are still in evidence—but there are now none of Jane Hawking, of course.

  Adoration and respect are the upside of Hawking’s new-found status as some sort of universal guru, but as his fame has escalated, controversy has naturally followed close behind; controversy that has often overshadowed his scientific pronouncements and upset his private life.

  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. Rival writer and physicist John Barrow commented in one newspaper interview: “In a list of the twelve best theoretical physicists this century, Steve would be nowhere near.”9 And a new attack soon began. Articles started to appear by journalists condemning what they saw as Hawking’s own lack of qualification in making his now-famous comments about religion and the interface between his scientific and religious ideas. In October 2001, a poll run by the science journal Physics World to find those whom physicists themselves believed to be the greatest practitioners of their profession throughout history placed Einstein top with 119 votes and Newton second with 46, but Hawking received only 1 vote and came in last (along with many other scientists).

  Most prominent among Hawking’s critics is journalist Bryan Appleyard, who has repeatedly attacked Hawking in the popular press, calling him “arrogant” and claiming that his remarks outside the world of physics are “intellectually feeble.” Appleyard’s principal contention is that Hawking knows nothing of philosophy but is trying to belittle the subject and to replace religious and philosophical conviction with a purely empirical view of the universe. But in our opinion, Appleyard is blinded by his own misguided conviction that philosophy is the noblest of subjects, declaring in one particularly vitriolic piece:

  The admittedly thrilling and extraordinary nature of speculative physics works to convince readers they are in the hands of a great universal adept, and that this wizard will surely be as able to navigate the human realms as deftly as he does that of the stars. The first danger of this kind of belief is that it diminishes and discredits science itself. Hawking’s idea of science is that of a rarefied discipline far above the heads of ordinary people and definitely superior to all competing forms of knowledge.10

  If this were so, why did Stephen Hawking write a popular science book, why does he go out of his way to give free lectures to the public, and why is he so keen to have his books reach as wide a market as possible? His motivation can certainly not be solely attributed to financial reward and egomania.

  The general feeling among many scientists who support Hawking’s stance is that Appleyard has an axe to grind and has picked on Hawking as the embodiment of what he most despises about science. Hawking himself has said of the journalist, “He has a real chip on his shoulder. I don’t know that I have seen him write approvingly of anyone. I feel he’s a failed intellectual and so he has to decry everyone else.”11

  Appleyard is certainly not the only public critic of Hawking. Several academics have gone on record criticizing what they see as Hawking’s pure and even dangerous atheism, and a few have taken their grievances w
ith them to the lecture circuit. One of Hawking’s most able critics is the Nobel Prize nominee chemist Dr. “Fritz” Schaefer of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at the University of Georgia in the United States. In a lecture delivered in 1994 and now available on the Net, he quoted the great physicist (and atheist) Richard Feynman, who once said: “Everything in physical science is a lot of protons, neutrons and electrons, while in daily life, we talk about men and history or beauty and hope. Which is nearer to God—beauty and hope or the fundamental laws? To stand at either end and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is a complete understanding, is a mistake.” Schaefer then added, “I would have to say that what Stephen Hawking has done is to walk off one end of that pier.”

  Most of the flak has come not only from Hawking’s uncompromising empirical stance but also from his seeming disrespect for religious or philosophical explanations of the origin and nature of the universe. For this part, Hawking considers the many public statements of his antagonists as a touch hysterical and has wryly commented that if he had not included the famous line of A Brief History of Time—“However, if we do discover a complete theory . . . then we would know the mind of God”—he would have probably halved his sales at a single stroke.