The Mysteries of Stephen Hawking’s Universe
Why did “A Brief History of Time” make its author the most famous
scientist in the world?
IAN BERRY/MAGNUM
The New Republic, Samanth Subramanian
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/samanth-subramanian>/April 6, 2021
The last time Stephen Hawking was ever uncertain about his fame was
before a lecture in Cambridge, in the winter of 1988. Even then, really,
he should have been in no doubt. In previous years, he’d been profiled
by/Vanity Fair/and/The New York Times Magazine/, and the BBC had run
shows about his work. Then, that past April, his book on cosmology,/A
Brief History of Time
<https://bookshop.org/books/a-brief-history-of-time/9780553380163>/, had
been published to instant and staggering success. Bookstores ran out.
People wore T-shirts printed with the words STEPHEN HAWKING FAN CLUB.
Still, as one of his students drove him to the lecture, Hawking was
tetchy. “I’m worried that nobody will show up.”
Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity
by Charles Seife
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9781541618374>
Basic Books, 388 pp., $30.00
They reached the lecture hall. The student recalled to the journalist
Charles Seife:
You roll from the back door into the guts of the building, which
doesn’t have too many stairs, and we arrived in the room and it was
packed. Packed with people. People sitting on the stairs, probably
breaking all the rules for safety. And suddenly Stephen has this big
grin—that smile. That tells you that even he didn’t expect to catch
that fire.
This tale, told in Seife’s new book,/Hawking Hawking
<https://bookshop.org/books/hawking-hawking-the-selling-of-a-scientific-celebrity/9781541618374>/,
expresses several things at once. It visits Hawking just as he is
transitioning into a rare planetary superstardom—one touched off by/A
Brief History of Time/, which is now thought to have sold at least 10
million copies. It captures Hawking’s thirst for that kind of
recognition—or, at the very least, his unalloyed delight at securing it.
More than anything else, the story underscores the sheer improbability
of this entire affair. People had poured into an auditorium to hear an
immobile man with a computerized voice speak about bewildering theories
in physics—a prospect so audacious and remote, at most other times, that
Hawking himself was unprepared for it.
Then again, so much about Hawking was improbable. Whenhe died in 2018
<https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43396008>, he was 76 years old—not a
terribly old age, perhaps, but certainly one riper than anyone would
have forecast for him half a century earlier, when he was diagnosed with
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In his brain and his spinal cord, his
motor neurons slowly disintegrated, and the functions they
controlled—walking, eating, standing, speaking, even breathing—fell
away. In the public imagination, there is no union between man and
machine as complete as that between Hawking and the wheelchair that kept
him mobile. But he also had to be sustained by squads of unsung carers
and nurses, as well as two wives who found they’d smothered their own
identities to mother him.
In spite of these constraints, Hawking developed some of the most
original cosmological ideas of the twentieth century. For the
nonspecialist, much of the work in cutting-edge physics can seem doubly
impenetrable, both because it is girded by equations and because its
significance is not immediately evident. (Consider objective-collapse
theory, in which all the probabilistic lives of a particle coalesce into
a single wave function, a single reality, even if no one is observing
it—a detour around a key tenet of quantum mechanics.) The fine grain of
Hawking’s work—on black holes, the origins of the universe, and the
character of time—was also necessarily mathematical and dense. But in
its broadest articulations, it could feel so profound and fundamental
even to the laity that it often impinged on matters of theology.
In/Hawking Hawking/, Seife provides a lively survey of Hawking’s career,
although somewhat perplexingly he unrolls his story backward—death to
life, nuts to soup. His purpose is not to reveal Stephen Hawking the
human being: Hawking’s other biographers—including his first wife,Jane
Wilde
<https://bookshop.org/books/travelling-to-infinity-the-true-story-behind-the-theory-of-everything/9781846883668>;
the writersJohn Gribbin
<https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Stephen-Hawking/John-Gribbin/9781605989402>andKitty
Ferguson
<https://bookshop.org/books/stephen-hawking-an-unfettered-mind/9781250139368>;
and the scientistLeonard Mlodinow
<https://bookshop.org/books/stephen-hawking-a-memoir-of-friendship-and-physics/9781524748685?aid=9184&listref=amazing-lives-and-the-americans-with-disabilities-act>—have
done that with varying degrees of success, although Seife builds that
portrait out with fresh interviews and research. But he’s really in
pursuit of a more intriguing quarry: Hawking’s relationship with his
public, and the source of his celebrity. “Like Newton and Einstein,
Hawking was the shining star of physics, obscuring all others by his
sheer brilliance,” Seife writes, and he stresses repeatedly that people
perceived Hawking to be Einstein’s natural heir. But they were wrong,
Seife argues: Hawking was not the world’s smartest person or even the
best mind in physics in his time, and he won his renown because he
sought it and stage-managed it. And Seife raises two vital questions.
What is the nature of scientific fame? And why did Hawking, in
particular, succeed in achieving it?
------------------------------------------------------------------------
When Hawking was, by his own admission, an apathetic undergraduate at
Oxford, cosmology was a drowsy discipline. The revolution in the physics
of very big things—stars, galaxies, the key actors of the skies—had
stalled with Einstein, after his theories of relativity and gravity
replaced the classical Newtonian model. Einstein had proposed that space
and time jointly form the fabric of the universe, and that giant
agglomerations of matter warp this fabric to produce unusual
consequences: the effects of gravity, the bending of light, even the
slowing of time. But, confusingly, the physics of very big things seemed
to be utterly unconnected to the physics of very small things: subatomic
particles, which behaved according to the random, probabilistic laws of
quantum mechanics. And while quantum physicists could devise experiments
and observe the shadowy presences of their particles, cosmologists had
few ways to test their ideas empirically—to, for instance, peer back
into the origin of the universe to see Einsteinian effects at play.
“This field is not an active one,” Richard Feynman wrote to his wife,
after attending a conference on gravity in Warsaw in 1962. “There are
hosts of dopes here and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane
things are said and seriously discussed that I get into arguments.”
After learning the diagnosis of his disease in 1963, Hawking found a
fresh zeal for work. (At Oxford, he wrote in his astonishingly dull
memoir,/My Brief History
<https://bookshop.org/books/my-brief-history/9780345535283>/, “we
affected an air of complete boredom and the feeling that nothing was
worth making an effort for. One result of my illness has been to change
all that.”) He joined Cambridge as a doctoral student not long before
another physicist, Roger Penrose, suggested that large, dead stars
eventually collapse to a singularity—a tiny nub of limitless density and
immense gravitational power. In his thesis, Hawking transplanted
Penrose’s methods into the primal singularity: all the matter of the
universe, squeezed into the seed of its origin. And he showed that
Einstein’s equations predict just such a singularity, a point of
infinitude that expanded during the Big Bang. He then turned his
attention to those dead, collapsed stars—black holes—and theorized that
the horizon of their gravitational influence could never shrink. Either
they’d swallow more matter, which expanded their horizon, or they’d stay
the same. This “area theorem” unlocked an aspect of their behavior,
helping scientists understand the energies unleashed during spectacular
black-hole events. In 2015, an observatory detected gravitational waves
from a merger of two black holes—exactly the kind of episode, Seife
points out, that Hawking’s theory explains so well.
The Big Bang and black holes both command such mammoth quantities of
mass and energy that they’re fiercely relativistic phenomena, so in
puzzling them out Hawking helped revitalize Einsteinian cosmology. But
his work offered an additional promise. From the world of particle
physics, he borrowed one of Feynman’s techniques, which sums up all the
probable paths of a particle, and applied it to the Big Bang universe to
model all its potential evolutions. And he relied on particle physics
again when he argued that black holes leak tiny, foaming bits of matter
and energy at their gravitational horizon—trickles of Hawking radiation.
(In this way, black holes slowly evaporate and eventually blow up, a
fact that forced a recalibration of Hawking’s original area theorem.) By
pulling together relativity and quantum mechanics, Hawking kindled a
vision of a grand, unified theory—the perennial, perennially elusive
quest of physics—waiting just offstage. The end of physics, he said in a
lecture in 1980, might arrive “by the end of the century.”
Hawking’s audiences may not have mastered every nuance of his work, but
they were living through a spell of high delight with astronomy; through
the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been difficult to resist him. Humans
were on the moon, and/Cosmos/was on television. Instruments and
telescopes had progressed so that cosmologists could make empirical
observations about the skies. The skies gave willingly: the signature of
microwave background radiation, left over from the Big Bang; Cygnus X-1,
the first discovered black hole; the existence of exoplanets. In other
streams of physics, things were becoming more abstruse, more
microscopic. The physicist Michael Green wrote, in a 1986 article
in/Scientific American/, that theorists like himself, struck by the
thought that all particles are made up of infinitesimal “strings”
vibrating in multiple dimensions, were sweating over the fiendish math
of the details. “We are still groping for a unifying insight into the
logic of the theory.” In contrast, Hawking dealt with the broadest
possible picture—with ideas that were, quite literally, of cosmic
significance. It was easier for a gas station attendant to visualize a
black hole than an abstract, multidimensional string. “Do you know
Professor Hawking?” one such attendant actually inquired of a scientist
who was passing through. “He’s my hero.”
Seife is a clear interpreter of Hawking’s physics, but he is also
determined to be a cool judge of Hawking’s career. Some of his
discoveries are new and disconcerting. He writes, for instance, that in
1999 Hawking scuttled a student’s entry into a Ph.D. program because his
research directly contradicted one of Hawking’s own theories. Penrose,
who won the physics Nobel last year, also reveals that Hawking’s
epiphany around his “area theorem” was really mostly Penrose’s own. (“I
never wanted to bring it up. Because it was a big thing for him,”
Penrose says.) Some of Seife’s other criticisms—designed to shake the
myth of Hawking’s all-surpassing brilliance—might baffle the
professional scientist. He notes that some of Hawking’s ideas were
wrong, and that he came upon a proof for Hawking radiation only while
trying to demolish another physicist’s preliminary work in that
direction—except that both mistakes and bloody-mindedness are essential
to scientific advance. At some point, Seife writes, Hawking stopped
being “a trendsetter,” and he received only one vote in a/Physics
World/poll <https://physicsworld.com/a/physics-past-present-future/>of
the greatest physicists ever. (Einstein topped, with 119.) These metrics
signify little in the context of scientific research; they’re merely
imports from the kind of media coverage of Hawking that Seife insists is
meaningless, the kind that crowned Hawking as the world’s most brilliant
man.
It isn’t that Seife thinks there were other candidates who deserved to
be exalted more—or if he does, he doesn’t mention them. His project is
to appraise the gap between Hawking’s private personality and his public
persona, to show how—unsurprisingly, as with any darling of the
press—the persona towered over and obscured the personality, and to
reveal Hawking to be the deliberate architect of that persona. Hawking’s
detractors were most peeved by his courting of the public—by his
readiness to oversimplify serious physics, or to expound on unfamiliar
subjects like biological weapons and philosophy, orto slum it on/Star
Trek: The Next Generation/
<https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/a-look-back-at-stephen-hawkings-cameo-on-star-trek-the-next-generation>andPink
Floyd’s/The Division Bell/
<https://genius.com/Pink-floyd-keep-talking-lyrics>. He couldn’t have
been blamed, however, for yellow journalism’s preoccupation with him—the
type that resulted, for instance, in headlines like “GENIUS WEDS NURSE”
and “EINSTEIN WEDDING BOYCOTT” when Hawking’s children from his first
wife didn’t attend his second wedding.
Scientists believe that a wider prominence ought to be earned the same
way that tenure or a Nobel is: with mountains of original, frequently
cited work, and nothing else. This feels like a misunderstanding of why
people look to scientists like Hawking, though. They want not just a
glimpse of the most arresting mysteries of our universe but also a sense
of our species’ progress in unraveling them. And to be reassured about
the capacity of human thinking requires a relationship with the human
doing the thinking. One of Hawking’s bluntest critics came to this
recognition unwittingly. “He’s working on the same things that everybody
else is,” this unnamed physicist once told the writer John Boslough. “He
just received a lot of attention because of his condition.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hawking was fortunate that, well before his diagnosis, he’d chosen to
pursue cosmology, a field that yielded to intuition and absolute
thought. He didn’t need experiments, and after he stopped being able to
do equations on paper, he could still design and test grand theories in
his head. “I’d rather be right than rigorous,” he’d say. Any physicist
or mathematician with a pure, instinctive feel for their discipline
becomes, to the rest of us, a deeply romantic figure, as if they’d
tapped into some secret vein of cosmic truth. Hawking was doubly so: a
physicist whose gift was housed in a wrecked anatomy. He was all mind.
But his illness also explains why Hawking thrust himself beyond physics
and academia. The expenses of being a scientist with ALS ran to
round-the-clock nursing, assistants, hospital emergencies, specialized
equipment, and complicated travel arrangements. When Hawking wrote/A
Brief History of Time/, he bypassed the university presses so that he
could earn a fatter advance; the higher his profile rose, the more
financial support he found from foundations, millionaires, and
universities. Everyone had an opinion on how much of the book its
purchasers had actually consumed and understood. Hawking benefited, the
writer Simon Jenkins wrote in/The Times/of London, “from ‘wisdom by
association.’ Buying a book is a step more virtuous than merely reading
a review of it, but need not involve reading it.” But Gribbin’s
biography of Hawking also describes the exasperation of readers with
such intellectual snobbery, and the book’s capacity to spark the lay
imagination.
/A Brief History of Time/won Hawking his financial security; the
celebrity was a secondary effect. Certainly he reveled in his
reputation, which offered a measure of immortality to an all-too-mortal
body. And certainly he was passionate about relaying his science into
the popular realm, hoping, as he wrote in/A Brief History of Time/, that
one day “we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary
people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it
is that we and the universe exist.” But he may never have committed
himself so thoroughly to a public life had it not been for the need to
sustain his physiological life. One journalist scolded Bantam Books, the
publisher of/A Brief History of Time/, for exploiting Hawking’s
affliction by placing a photo of him in his wheelchair on the book’s
cover. Hawking was displeased with the photo, and he wanted always to be
known for his physics. But as the agent of his own fame, he recognized,
pragmatically rather than cynically, that he could keep at his physics
only if he shared himself with the public.
Everything, then, seems to fall short of some presumed ideal: Hawking’s
material motivations for finding an audience, the fullness of his
readers’ understanding of his work, the tabloids’ sordid fascination
with Hawking, the uncerebral tenor of his fame. But all of this amply
reflects the nature of science itself. The ideal never exists. Science
is a human activity, beset like all other human activities by emotion,
money, politics, strife—and, sometimes, devastating disease. Hawking’s
life was a reminder that we’re all imperfect beings trying to understand
a perfect universe.
Samanth Subramanian
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/samanth-subramanian>@samanth_s
<https://twitter.com/samanth_s>
Samanth Subramanian is the author of/A Dominant Character: The Radical
Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane/. He is a senior
reporter at Quartz.
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