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NY Times, Oct. 28 2014
The Leaky Science of Hollywood
Stephen Hawking’s Movie Life Story Is Not Very Scientific
by Dennis Overbye
It would be nice if producers of science movies spent half as much time
on getting the science right as they do on, say, wardrobes or hairstyles.
I’m tired of complaining about this, but we are in an extraordinary run
of such movies right now, and I’d love to see one that doesn’t make me
gnash my teeth.
Last year, “Gravity,” which won seven Oscars, delivered amazingly
realistic depictions of space hardware and weightlessness, but bungled
the simple rules of orbital mechanics. Next week will bring us not one
but two movies with black holes at their core: “The Theory of
Everything,” about the early life and times of Stephen Hawking, the
British physicist and best-selling author; and “Interstellar,” directed
and written by the Nolan brothers, Christopher and Jonathan, about
astronauts traveling through a wormhole to find a new home for humanity.
(Intriguingly, it is based on work by one of Dr. Hawking’s oldest
buddies, Kip Thorne of the California Institute of Technology.)
“The Theory of Everything” has a lot going for it. Eddie Redmayne is
justly being promoted for an Oscar nomination for his uncanny portrayal
of Dr. Hawking and the relentless wasting effects of amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis, a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s disease, for which any number of
celebrities have lately endured an orgy of ice-bucket drenchings.
Millions of people and science fans who have read Dr. Hawking’s books,
flocked to his lectures and watched him on “The Simpsons,” “Star Trek”
and “The Big Bang Theory” have never known him except as a wheelchaired
figure speaking in a robotic voice; for all they know he was always that
way and floated down to Earth on a comet, like Venus drifting in on a
half-shell.
Mr. Redmayne’s performance — from the gnarled, paralyzed fingers to the
mischievous spark that lights an otherwise frozen face as he savors a
joke or a bon mot — is spot on. The dramatic high point, when he clicks
a mouse and the words “My name is Stephen Hawking” come out of a speaker
with a robotic American accent, is a genuine creation moment. There were
tears in my eyes.
But the movie doesn’t deserve any prizes for its drive-by muddling of
Dr. Hawking’s scientific work, leaving viewers in the dark about exactly
why he is so famous. Instead of showing how he undermined traditional
notions of space and time, it panders to religious sensibilities about
what his work does or does not say about the existence of God, which in
fact is very little.
To its credit, the movie does not shy away from the darker parts of Dr.
Hawking’s story. It is based on the 2007 memoir “Traveling to Infinity:
My Life With Stephen,” by his first wife, Jane Wilde — one of two books
she has written about what it was like to fall in love with and then
care for an increasingly disabled and celebrated genius. Jane eventually
takes up with the choirmaster at her church; Stephen wheels away with
his nurse Elaine Mason, whom he subsequently married and then divorced.
Dr. Hawking, 72, is said to have signed off, if reluctantly, on a movie
that would fill in the personal side of his life. Of all the courageous
things he has done, this might have been the bravest: entrusting his
life story to an ex-wife.
He allowed the producers to use actual recordings of his iconic voice,
and after seeing the movie he pronounced it “broadly true,” according to
the director, James Marsh, who won an Oscar for the 2008 documentary
“Man on Wire.”
But when it came to science, I couldn’t help gnashing my teeth after
all. Forget for a moment that early in the story the characters are
sitting in a seminar in London talking about black holes, the bottomless
gravitational abysses from which not even light can escape, years before
that term had been coined. Sadly, a few anachronisms are probably
inevitable in a popular account of such an arcane field as astrophysics.
It gets worse, though. Skip a few scenes and years ahead. Dr. Hawking,
getting ready for bed, is staring at glowing coals in the fireplace and
has a vision of black holes fizzing and leaking heat.
The next thing we know he is telling an audience in an Oxford lecture
hall that black holes, contrary to legend and previous theory, are not
forever, but will leak particles, shrink and eventually explode, before
a crank moderator declares the session over, calling the notion “rubbish.”
The prediction of Hawking radiation, as it is called, is his greatest
achievement, the one he is most likely to get a Nobel Prize for. But it
didn’t happen with a moment of inspiration staring at a fireplace. And
in telling the story this way, the producers have cheated themselves out
of what was arguably the most dramatic moment in his scientific career.
Dr. Hawking had been goaded by work by Alexei Starobinsky in Moscow and
Jacob Bekenstein in Princeton into trying to determine the properties of
microscopic black holes. That required a daunting calculation that would
combine quantum theory with Einsteinian gravity, twin poles of
theoretical physics thought until then to be mathematically incompatible.
It took months, during which his friends and colleagues were sure he
would fail. They propped quantum textbooks open in front of him and then
went away, wondering what if anything would come of him.
When Dr. Hawking discovered that quantum effects would make black holes
leaky, it went against all his intuition and expectations. He spent a
couple of lonely months trying to figure out where he had gone wrong, at
one point locking himself in a bathroom to think. The penumbra of
uncertainty and randomness with which quantum theory endowed nature on
the smallest scales would in effect pierce the black hole’s previously
inviolable surface. His discovery has turned out to be a big, big deal,
because it implies, among other things, that three-dimensional space is
an illusion. Do we live in a hologram, like the picture on a credit
card? Or the Matrix?
None of this, alas, is in the movie. That is more than bad history. The
equations on the blackboard appear to be authentic — the movies are
always great at getting the design details right — but as usual it
misses the big picture, the zigzaggy path of collaboration, competition
and even combat by which science actually progresses. By leaving out
people like Dr. Bekenstein and Dr. Starobinsky, the movie reinforces the
stereotype of the lone genius already ingrained by the media and the
Nobel Prizes.
In Dr. Hawking’s case the stereotype is compounded by his disability,
which causes the rest of the world — especially the media — to regard
his every statement as if it came from the Delphic oracle.
It also devalues Dr. Hawking’s own work, the months of intense
calculation that are required to turn inspiration into a real theory, by
making it look easy. Science isn’t easy, even for the Einsteins among
us, which doesn’t mean it isn’t fun.
“The Theory of Everything” is only a movie, and I should be thrilled
that Dr. Hawking is at last getting his due from the star-making
machinery of the big screen and that black holes are even part of the
cultural discourse. And I am. It is, as Dr. Hawking said, “broadly true.”
But at the risk of coming off as cranky nerd, I wish the moviemakers had
been able to hew to a higher authority.
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