Review of Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by Charles Seife

BY CHRIS EDWARDS

As a genre, celebrity biographies are consistently entertaining so long as the reader abides by a single rule: put the book down when the celebrity enters rehab. People get famous and make bad decisions in different ways, but everyone gets sober and boring the same way. Unfortunately, Charles Seife’s new book about Stephen Hawking titled Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity cannot be read that way. Stephen Hawking never got too wild, and Seife never quite decides what his book is about. The title (a bit too clever, I might add, as the cover just includes the word “Hawking” above and below an image of Stephen, not making the meaning clear; at least italicize the first “Hawking” and put them side by side so everyone can see the intent) makes it sound as if the book should be about how the publishing in dustry, and/or Hawking’s family, turned Stephen Hawking into an international celebrity. However, the book reads much more like an ordinary scientific biography. Seife’s narrative is lively, but any reader familiar with Hawking’s life already can put the book down about Chapter 12, when Stephen and Jane visit Caltech in the 1970s before the fame, as this is when Seife’s central thesis seems to end.

It should be stated in the beginning that Seife proposes nothing new about Hawking. Among the scientifically literate, Hawking was never considered a historical figure like Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Einstein, Godel, or Heisenberg. For example, James Gleick’s 1992 biography Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics contains this paragraph:

Genius was not a word in [Feynman’s] customary vocabulary. Like many physicists he was wary of the term. Among scientists it became a kind of style violation, a faux pas suggesting greenhorn credulity, to use the word genius about a living colleague…Briefly Stephen Hawking, a British cosmologist, esteemed but not revered by his peers, developed a reputation among nonscientists as Einstein’s heir to the mantle. For Hawking, who suffered from a progressively degenerative muscle disease, the image of the genius was heightened by the drama of a formidable intelligence fighting to express itself within a withered body. Still, in terms of raw brilliance and hard accomplishment, a few score of his professional colleagues felt he was no more a genius than they. (p. 322)

Seife essentially makes the same point, except with an additional nuance: “The professor’s image had been built into a towering contradiction: On one hand, Hawking appeared to the world to be something more than human, his mind so transcendent that he was in a class by himself. … Yet, on the other hand, he could be treated as a nearly inanimate object.” (p. viii)