How should we remember Stephen Hawking? As a cosmologist, a science popularizer, a media darling, or the world’s most famous wheelchair user? In Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, an unauthorized biography of the late theorist, science writer Charles Seife shows that the answer is all of the above. His science gave Hawking something to say, and his computer-generated voice let it be heard.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking experiencing near-weightlessness during a 2007 flight that simulated a zero-gravity environment.
Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking experiencing near-weightlessness during a 2007 flight that simulated a zero-gravity environment.
Hawking began exhibiting signs of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1963, at 21, when he was still completing his graduate degree at the University of Cambridge. His prognosis was bleak; at best, he likely had only a few years left. Instead, he lived another half century, during which time he made good use of a series of assistive technologies and adaptive equipment to continue writing, lecturing, and living. A tracheostomy in 1985 saved his life but eliminated his ability to speak without the computer-generated voice that became his trademark.
And that familiar voice may have been legally trademarked: Although Seife acknowledges that he couldn’t find evidence to support the claim, he repeats actor Eddie Redmayne’s assertion that Hawking owned the copyright to his computer-generated voice and gave the makers of the 2014 film The Theory of Everything permission to use it. In any case, after the tracheostomy, Hawking relied on popularization and media appearances to bankroll the extraordinary medical costs associated with his round-the-clock care.
Popular media representations of Hawking, whether in the Daily Telegraph or on The Simpsons, tended to portray him as a singular genius or a disembodied brain. “He had become,” Seife writes, “a symbol to the public, a transcendent mind in a withered body.” In rightly rejecting that metaphor, Seife imposes a troubling alternative: Hawking as a black hole. And in truth, Hawking held his own story close. He resisted entreaties from his in-house editor, his personal editor, and his agent to incorporate more of his own story into his career-defining A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). Nor is his memoir, My Brief History (2013), particularly revealing, as it was largely collated from previously published materials, not all of which were even written by Hawking.
Barred from Hawking’s archives and frustrated by the scientist’s reticence, Seife adopts Hawking’s methodological insights to seek deeper biographical truths. Like a black hole, Seife suggests, Hawking is best understood by looking backwards through time. The book is therefore structured in reverse chronological order, using events from Hawking’s life as emissions with a diminishing signal.
Because Hawking so frequently outlived the relevance of his theoretical contributions, that narrative approach—challenging under the best of circumstances—means that Seife frequently introduces readers to Hawking’s ideas at the moment they were experimentally negated. For example, Hawking’s particle-physics contributions from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed in the early 2010s, when the Higgs boson’s existence was experimentally confirmed. Hawking had publicly bet that it would never be found.
In Seife’s account, Hawking’s increasing disability produces a biographical event horizon, beyond which information cannot escape. But how, I wondered, was Hawking’s desire to control his own story different from that of any other public figure? Working in the long tradition of unauthorized biographers, Seife relies on a series of less-than-charitable sources, including British tabloids, Hawking’s first wife, betrayed grad students, and even Hawking’s ex‒literary agent, Al Zuckerman, who recounts being “stunned” by his firing in 2015. (Hawking wanted more money.)
Seife uses those tidbits to reestablish Hawking as a man rather than a disembodied brain. The author depicts Hawking as a complicated human being with a chronic illness to be managed and human needs to be fed. Hawking’s home life, which at one point included his wife, her lover, his future wife, and her husband, did not meet middle-class expectations. Later there were reports that he was abused by his second wife. When traveling, he routinely asked his hosts to take him to strip clubs. It’s all a little tawdry, but then, that’s fame.
Hawking Hawking frequently returns to a theme previously explored in philosopher and anthropologist Hélène Mialet’s Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (2012)—namely, the layers of infrastructure that made it possible for Hawking to become singularly famous despite his total dependence on other people. The fact that Hawking used a computer to vocalize his speech, for example, meant that his words could be produced, recorded, and circulated without his participation. During the making of Errol Morris’s documentary film A Brief History of Time (1991), Hawking provided the director with a duplicate of his speech synthesizer. In 2015 his voice and image toured with the band U2.
For Mialet, the impossibility of separating Hawking, the man, from “Hawking,” the product, serves as a source of fascination and an example of how scientists’ work is always embedded in their social worlds. For Seife, it’s a symbol of Hawking’s distance from mainstream scientific practices.
But Stephen Hawking was not a “collapsed star” or a “faint reflection of what he once had been,” nor did he stop being a “real human being” when his health declined, as Seife asserts in the introduction. He was not a singularity. He was a cosmologist, a science popularizer, a media darling, and the world’s most famous wheelchair user. Recognizing that he was all of that all at once should enrich rather than diminish our understanding of Hawking’s life.
Audra J. Wolfe is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and historian of science. She is the author of Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018).
