AUTHOR: STEPHEN HAWKING
DATE: 1988
One of the bestselling science books of all time, A Brief History of Time helped change the popular understanding of cosmology (the science of the origin and development of the universe) and theoretical physics, introducing the intricacies of, for example, quantum mechanics and imaginary time to a global, lay audience. ‘I am pleased a book on science competes with the memoirs of pop stars,’ Hawking would later note. ‘Maybe there is some hope for the human race.’
Hawking was born in Oxford, England, in 1942, and showed early academic promise, winning a place to study Physics at University College, Oxford. After graduating with a First, he then studied for a PhD at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It was in this period that he received the devastating diagnosis that he was suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, for short) – an early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, which over the subsequent decades would leave him paralysed and unable to speak unaided.
BETTER THAN SEX
If A Brief History of Time was the stand-out science publishing sensation of the late twentieth century, its counterpart in popular culture came in 1992 when Madonna published her controversial ‘coffee-table book’, Sex. With its adult content, the book sold extravagantly in its early days, quickly notching sales of 1.5 million. But it never came close to the estimated 25 million that Hawking’s book sold. Talking of A Brief History in 2004, former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Myhrvold, wryly noted: ‘It outsold Madonna’s book Sex, and by a huge margin, and who would have predicted that?’
But Hawking refused to let the news of his illness slow him down. In fact, faced with premature death, he grasped every opportunity with a fervour and passion that had not hitherto always been apparent. He embarked on a slew of ground-breaking work in the area of cosmology, and black holes especially, forging a particularly close association with mathematical physicist Roger Penrose. Together, they investigated black holes within the framework of general relativity, predicting that they send out radiation. (Penrose would eventually be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics – one of the few accolades that eluded Hawking.)
While Hawking was a shining light in the scientific firmament by the mid-1980s, he was hardly the household name that he was destined to become. He was conjuring with the idea of a ‘theory of everything’ that brought together general relativity and quantum mechanics into a cohesive whole – and he also started to mull over the idea of a popular science book. His idea was to write a book about the origins of the universe that would explain the great leaps made in our collective knowledge over the previous few decades, but that would be written in language that anyone could grasp. A very tall order. He was determined, for instance, to avoid reams of complex equations and, in the end, he included just one – arguably the most famous equation in history, Einstein’s E=mc2. It is said he kept the number so low because he had been told each additional equation would halve his readership.
Hawking got himself a hotshot New York agent and sought out the biggest book deal he could find. He signed up with Bantam in 1984, a firm with mass-market heft that offered a quarter of a million dollars for US rights alone. Hawking’s health took a downturn the following year and the writing process was arduous but the book was ready to roll off the press in 1988. But not before his editor, Peter Guzzardi, made the inspired decision to rename the book. Instead of Hawking’s planned: From the Big Bang to Black Holes: A Short History of Time it now became A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. An introduction by another of the century’s scientific giants, Carl Sagan, helped to create a real buzz around the launch.
At the core of the book was Hawking’s conviction that science would soon hit upon the ultimate theory of how our universe came into being. Famously, he likened this achievement to knowing ‘the mind of God’. The sales that followed were unprecedented for a science book – it achieved 147 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in the US and 237 weeks in the Times’ bestsellers in the UK, not to mention translation into over forty languages. (‘I knew it was going to be a success when it was translated into Serbo-Croatian,’ Hawking once quipped.) Jokes began to circulate about it being the bestselling book that people didn’t read beyond Chapter 1. Critics pointed out that the prose was not always unfailingly elegant and some of the science was very difficult to grasp. But Hawking did succeed in introducing millions to such concepts as the Big Bang and imaginary time (the idea that was, he acknowledged, ‘the thing in the book with which people have most trouble’). Maybe not everyone could digest it, but it surely served as an inspiration to a great many aspiring scientists across the planet.
Confined to a wheelchair and able to speak only with an electronic voice box with a highly idiosyncratic tone, Hawking became the most famous scientist on the planet. Only the wild-haired Albert Einstein has ever enjoyed a comparable level of celebrity among scientists. For the rest of his life, until his death in 2018 – exceeding by decades his doctors’ life-expectancy prognosis – he was a major public figure and educator as well as cutting-edge researcher. Where Hawking fits in the pantheon of great scientists is a subject of some debate. It can be argued he was not responsible for a scientific revolution in the mode of a Newton or an Einstein. But in terms of communicating complex science to the masses, A Brief History of Time stands alongside the great works of scientific writing – a literary Big Bang.
Martin Rees – a cosmologist, astrophysicist, Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society – would say of Hawking in 2015: ‘His name will live in the annals of science; millions have had their cosmic horizons widened by his bestselling books; and even more, around the world, have been inspired by a unique example of achievement against all the odds – a manifestation of astonishing willpower and determination.’