HAWKING HAWKING

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) was the world’s most famous scientist for the last 30 years of his life. This engrossing, sometimes unsettling account shows why.

NYU journalism professor Seife writes that Hawking converted cosmology from a backwater to “the most exciting field in physics, an area that was (and still is) generating Nobel Prize after Nobel Prize for transforming our understanding of how the universe came to be.” In his 1965 doctoral thesis, Hawking proved that the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe, had to be an infinitely small point where the laws of physics don’t apply. This “singularity theorem” ignited his career. During the 1970s and ’80s, he produced spectacular, highly mathematical discoveries on black holes and the early universe that dazzled colleagues. Due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, his strength began declining in the 1960s, and by the ’80s, he was entirely paralyzed and unable to talk. Britain’s National Health Service paid basic medical expenses, but only a rich man could have afforded the army of attendants that allowed him to live at home, work, communicate, socialize, and travel the world. Fortunately, he had become an international celebrity and author of the blockbuster 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time. This eased his financial troubles at the time, but they persisted for the remainder of his life. Many of his subsequent books were “carelessly edited” knockoffs designed to make money, and Hawking often endorsed products in exchange for cash. As Seife demonstrates, the public and a worshipful media ignored his discoveries but obsessed about his disability, personal life, and his “pronouncements.” Any scandal, such as his “yen for strip clubs,” added to the legend. The last of many movies about him, The Theory of Everything (2014), was “a tear-jerker of a love story.” The author’s excellent explanation of Hawking’s science makes this a top-notch biography of a significant scientific figure, but Seife also produces a uniquely disturbing portrait of deliberate mythmaking.

An unflattering yet outstanding biography of a giant of 20th-century physics.