When I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking’s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was “too early” to voice anything other than praise for the physicist who died, aged 76, that March. It was apparently still too early in 2021, when no British publisher would touch Charles Seife’s exposé of Hawking’s bullying and self-aggrandising behaviour, Hawking Hawking. In this new biography, veteran science writer Graham Farmelo takes a different approach.
It is a comprehensive and accessible portrait of a brilliant scientist and an extraordinarily determined man who also possessed deep personal flaws to which the scientific community and the public mostly turned a blind eye. The uncomfortable but unavoidable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability. I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that.
As this book was authorised by the Hawking family, and as Farmelo (whose superb biography of Paul Dirac, The Strangest Man, won a Costa award in 2009) is a generous and kind writer, I had feared the warts would be omitted. But instead Farmelo handles them mostly by letting others’ words speak for themselves. But let’s start with the science, which offers a genuinely inspirational tale.
As Farmelo says, while Hawking’s longevity against all odds was surely due in part to the exceptional care and treatment he received, “it was his unconquerable will, resilience and fortitude that did most to make his remarkable career possible”. His scientific achievements would be impressive by any measure; when accomplished in the face of debilitating and ultimately paralysing motor neurone disease, they are extraordinary. Like many scientists of his calibre, Hawking was a slow and rather lackadaisical starter.
But once installed at Cambridge for a PhD under the supervision of astrophysicist Dennis Sciama, his sharp intelligence emerged. It was there in early 1963 that, after a series of falls, he was diagnosed and given less than 10 years to live. Undeterred, and despite steadily declining mobility and speech, he was electrified by the work of physicist Roger Penrose, 10 years his senior, on the gravitational collapse of dead stars into what had become known as black holes.
That process was predicted by Einstein’s 1915 theory of general relativity, but Penrose was the first to show convincingly that it should lead to a “singularity” where all the star’s matter condenses to zero volume: an object with mass but no matter. Hawking had the brilliant insight that this same process, happening in reverse, could explain the big bang, in which the entire universe came into being from “nothing” 13.8bn years (as we now know) ago. That was his first triumph, described in a 1970 paper with Penrose.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
