Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity – Black holes and bad behaviour

Some of Stephen Hawking’s admirers, and there are millions, will be disenchanted, even distressed, by this cleverly though somewhat cruelly titled biography of the scientist who discovered black hole radiation.

Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University, has a remarkably firm grasp of the ever-shifting theories of contemporary atomic physics, which is just as well, since those theories are mind-bogglingly obscure. He sees his subject whole and sees him plain, and his book is fair to a fault to a man who considered that the celebrity figure he most resembled was not Albert Einstein but Marilyn Monroe – known for his body more than for his mind.

As Seife amply shows, Hawking, though a superb mathematician and a great scientific theorist, had ordinary faults like us ordinary folk, perhaps even a few more than most. He was arrogant, selfish, unjust to his wives – though one of them may have abused him both emotionally and physically – dismissive of many of his colleagues or in some cases jealous of them, as he could be even of his students if they showed themselves a bit too bright for comfort. He had what his sometimes overindulgent biographer describes as a “wicked” sense of humour; mostly this involved practical jokes, surely the lowest form of fun available to man.

Yes, Hawking could be a royal shit; he also had one of the finest analytical intellects of our time and for half a century fought with courage and tenacity against motor neuron disease, which when he was diagnosed with it at the age of 21 would, according to his doctors, kill him within a matter of months. That he survived for so long is one of his greatest achievements, not least for the fact that his example brought comfort and hope to many similarly afflicted human beings and taught the rest of us to be a little more humble and a great deal more grateful to be healthy and mobile, for a time.

Hawking’s early theorising brought him respect from and some fame among his colleagues, but in those days it was his work he was known for, not the fact that it was done despite his condition. It took his editor at Bantam Books, Peter Guzzardi, to realise that a publicity campaign highlighting Hawking’s illness might turn A Brief History of Time into a bestseller; as Seife drily observes, “generally speaking, tabloids aren’t terribly interested in the arcana of particle physics”.

Fame and fun

As we know, Guzzardi’s hunch was to prove correct, momentously so. Hawking’s instructive and entertaining though somewhat trite book became one of the biggest bestsellers of all time, and made its author extremely wealthy.

It brought him fun, too. “I didn’t really appreciate how much Stephen enjoyed the limelight,” Guzzardi said. “I mean, he just thrived on it.” And why not? Heaven knows, or certainly hell does, the poor man’s condition allowed him few physical pleasures. He did love his food, though, and seems to have had a taste for the low life. One newspaper reported that, “according to a source”, he was a regular at a California sex club: “Last time I saw him he was in the back ‘play area’ lying on a bed fully clothed with two naked women gyrating all over him.”

At least he kept his kit on.

Many of the laws of particle physics are counterintuitive. As Richard Feynman declared, no one understands quantum theory. It doesn’t make any sense on our level, yet quantum mechanics is at the heart of everything in our world, from the structure of the atom through the technology of mobile phones to the formation of galaxies.

Hawking began his scientific work in the area of black holes, which were at the time – the mid-1960s – still a recent discovery. A black hole occurs when a star collapses and its gravity becomes so strong it will allow nothing to escape, not even light. An observer on this side of the black hole’s “event horizon” can know nothing of what is happening on the other side. As a young physicist, Jacob Bekenstein, observed, “a black hole has no hair”. It is a striking formulation, and one that suggests Bekenstein has either a scatological sense of humour or a mind so delicate it missed the unfortunate double entendre.

Laws of nature

Hawking, locked in the laboratory of his mind, was fascinated by a phenomenon that so scandalously flouts the rules by which the observable universe sustains itself. At the centre of a black hole there is a “singularity”, a state in which the laws of nature break down. How could that be? At a scientific conference in the French Alps in 1972, Hawking met a fellow specialist in black holes, one Jacob Bekenstein – for it is he – who had published a paper suggesting that a black hole, among other qualities, has temperature, and therefore must radiate energy; that in fact it has hair.

Hawking vehemently opposed the thesis. And he got together with a couple of scientific pals to disprove it with a paper of their own, and send the upstart Bekenstein packing. But as often happens in science, opposition to the theory led to its being proved valid. Hawking worked relentlessly at the problem, and in the end found, to his consternation, that indeed black holes aren’t entirely sealed.

Seife writes that when matter approaches, “the black hole would swallow some ... frothy, evanescent particles, while others would be ... freed from the confines of the black hole’s gravity, and zoom off into the cosmos”. Martin Rees, one of leading astronomers at the time, exclaimed: “Everything is different. Everything is changed!”

It was a triumph for Hawking, and probably should have got him a Nobel prize. Bekenstein was remarkably generous, declaring that he had no idea black holes could radiate, but “Hawking brought that out very clearly. So that should be called Hawking radiation.” And so it was, and is. Hawking enshrined the finding in an equation that, though probably you, like your humble reviewer, will not be able to understand it, is worth recording if only for the look of the thing.

As Seife writes, “It is the formula inscribed on [Hawking’s] tomb at Westminster Abbey. It represents his greatest scientific achievement, and it was his ticket to immortality.” And its fame needs no hawking.