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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. The best came four years later, when Hawking proposed that, thanks to the peculiar quantum-mechanical nature of spacetime, black holes are not really black because they should constantly radiate a dim glow of particles – now called Hawking radiation – that will eventually lead to their evaporation. That work was a virtuosic blend of four fundamental ideas in physics: general-relativistic gravity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics and information theory.
It was the high point of his research career: Hawking’s scientific achievements were largely done by the time he became a global celebrity, appearing on Star Trek and The Simpsons and becoming the subject of the 2014 Oscar-winning biopic The Theory of Everything. It is “as a truly great elucidator of black holes” that he will be remembered, Farmelo rightly judges.
I’m not alone in thinking Hawking’s work on black-hole thermodynamics and the discovery of Hawking radiation were worthy of a Nobel prize. (Hawking became obsessed to an unseemly degree with getting one.) But let’s keep it in proportion. Anyone who compares Hawking to Einstein knows nothing about Einstein or physics. Einstein made wide-ranging contributions to the discipline, but Hawking’s expertise was narrow and his forays outside it were sometimes embarrassing. Even in the closely related field of particle physics he said things that were, as Peter Higgs (of Higgs boson fame) said, “total crap”. “He made pronouncements about things he had no understanding of,” Higgs said – in the confident knowledge that it would make newspaper headlines the next day, uncritically lapped up by reporters.
Which brings us to the problematic stuff. While professional colleagues mostly spoke about Hawking with reverence and affection, it is often those closest to him who speak of another side. His father, Frank, worried that the teenaged Stephen “was developing into a selfish character … like a small boy who took everything but gave little in return”. There was evidently no love lost with his sister Mary, who called him “one of the most self-centred people I’ve ever met”. At Oxford, some friends found him rather lazy and entitled, and at Cambridge “annoyingly haughty”. His youngest son recounted how his father was “hugely competitive” and never let him or his siblings win at board games.
His unsparing ridicule of his first wife Jane’s religious beliefs contributed to their marital tensions, and the sacrifices she made often went unremarked by him. The pressure of going from lover to carer would never have been easy, but Hawking’s “authoritarian” demands and indifference to Jane’s interests added to her isolation. His adoptive brother, Edward, admitted “I’ve never really felt close to Stephen … he seems very cold.” And his mother, Isobel, complained how he would ignore people when it suited him. “I suppose what in other people would just be bad manners is excusable great-mannishness in him,” she wrote bitterly in her diary.
Sometimes the indulgence gets creepy. Who else’s Marilyn Monroe obsession would be pampered by hiring a lookalike to croon “I want to be loved by you” to him in a “whispery voice” on his birthday? What Farmelo calls “flirting” might have been seen as something else if Hawking had not been using a wheelchair. He does not mention the nights at Stringfellows strip club and makes light of the trip to (pre-conviction) Jeffrey Epstein’s island. But we do hear how Hawking’s victory in a scientific bet was celebrated by making his opponents deliver lectures in T-shirts showing scantily clad women. Hilarious.
Hawking was scandalously bad at giving due scientific credit to others, a trait evident from the outset when he failed to indicate his debt to Penrose. Worse was his treatment of physicist Jacob Bekenstein, whose idea about the connection between the area and the entropy of a black hole he mercilessly derided before discovering for himself that Bekenstein was right – and then essentially claiming the idea as his own, which Farmelo says “disappointed some of Stephen’s friends”. Hawking could clearly be a supportive and kind adviser to his own students, but when one discovered an argument for why Hawking was wrong about a conjecture concerning black holes, he tried to get him dismissed from the Cambridge PhD programme.
Some of his colleagues, Farmelo says, “believed that Stephen’s talks were ‘all about him’ and that he rarely gave much public credit to his peers”. Farmelo suspects they rarely grumbled because “such comments would have been interpreted as mean-spirited”. But mean-spiritedness rarely deters academics; what he surely means is mean-spirited about a scientist with a disability. And there’s the problem. If we were to start finally treating Hawking as we do any other scientist, it would be a positive step for disability in science (which is still poorly accommodated). The effect on Hawking’s legacy is another matter.
