Book review
Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity
Review by Felicity Mellor
This is an unauthorised biography, giving Seife the freedom to present a warts-and-all account.
How to tell a story about a story being overtold? Charles Seife’s biography of celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking sets out to do just this, puncturing the Hawking mythology in an attempt to separate the symbol from the human.
The broad outline of the story is well known: as a young scientist Stephen Hawking made important breakthroughs in general relativity, establishing himself intellectually even as motor neurone disease left him, first, unable to walk, then unable to write, and by his 40s, unable to talk. The publication of his best-seller A Brief History of Time in 1988 led to lasting world-wide fame. He died in 2018 having outlived his doctors’ original prognosis by many decades.
When a life has been lived as publicly as Hawking’s, one challenge for the biographer is how to provide a fresh perspective. Seife’s approach is to emphasise the discontinuities between the mediated public image and the man himself. On the one hand, here is the smiling self-deprecating media personality, the genius successor to Newton and Einstein whose heroic struggle transcends all physical disability; on the other hand, there is a sometimes stubborn and arrogant man who made important, but not paradigm-breaking, contributions to physics and who resisted being defined by the failings of his body.
Seife makes the case that Hawking’s greatest success resides, not directly in his physics, but in his cultivation of his media personality — the irony being that this man for whom communication was so restricted triumphed in the field of communication.
This is an unauthorised biography, giving Seife the freedom to present a warts-and-all account. As he notes, this comes at the cost of access to the Hawking archive, to Hawking’s family or even to many of his close colleagues. The Hawking Estate is holding tight all of Hawking’s papers — even to the extent of withdrawing papers that had previously been accessible in Cambridge. Despite this constraint, Seife makes good use of interviews with those who were prepared to talk to him and is exhaustive in his use of published sources.
In foregrounding the tensions that were an inherent part of Hawking’s celebrity, Seife traverses the territory covered by sociologist Hélène Mialet in her study Hawking Incorporated. Seife’s approach is journalistic rather than analytical, but he similarly reveals how Hawking’s identity gradually became distributed through a network of assistants — both human and technological — that was centred on his diminished body. For instance, Seife traces how the digitisation of Hawking’s speech after his tracheostomy in 1985, resulted in a store house of standard statements that he (and others) re-used in multiple contexts, reinforcing the tendency of celebrity to reduce identity to a set of recycled materials.
To re-signify these endless recyclings, Seife made the radical decision to tell the story backwards, peeling off layers of time chapter by chapter much as an archaeologist digs through layers of soil. Each chapter is itself largely chronological, but the narrative as a whole runs backwards in time. This is a clever play on Hawking’s own subject; how time behaves is a major preoccupation in general relativity and most of the equations of physics are time symmetric, time can flow in both directions. The upending of the narrative structure also serves as a metaphor for Seife’s take on Hawking’s condition: the narrative begins with the death of a man who, as Seife later puts it, has no more control over his body than a new-born infant; it ends with that man as a new-born infant.
However, for a work of non-fiction, telling a story backwards imposes a heavy burden on both the writing and reading. Causal connectivity is the backbone of narrativity. Upturn the chronology and the lines of causation — already hard enough to establish for a real life — are difficult to trace. Science, too, builds on what has gone before. To explain Hawking’s later ideas, Seife must reference the earlier ideas he has not yet reached. The result is both repetitious (for instance, the wording of a bet appears on both p. 85 and p. 149; a quote from Neil Turok appears on p. 122 and again on p. 215) — and disconcerting (for example, Hawking’s eldest son Robert is not mentioned until p. 236 despite having been alive in the half century covered in the preceding 235 pages).
Presumably, by placing Hawking’s early physics at the denouement of the narrative, Seife was hoping to emphasise its significance compared to his later work. Yet in this reverse chronology, these accomplishments are succeeded by the account of an ordinary student and a childhood lost in time. The narrative climax dissipates in fragmentary snapshots, seemingly trivial compared to what has come before. Seife says that turning the clock back helps recover the authentic human, but the difficulty with which he starts — of recovering an extraordinary life from the shrouds of mediated fame — is mirrored by the difficulty of recovering an ordinary youth from the shrouds of time. The authentic Hawking can never be recovered.
Seife’s reverse chronology, whilst perhaps not aiding narrative satisfaction, succeeds in producing a disorienting effect that is itself a comment on the mystifying tendencies of both popular physics and celebrification.
Dr Felicity Mellor is course director of the MSc in Science Communication at Imperial College London. Her research focuses on the media coverage of science, especially of physics, and on the ideological dimensions of narrative. Her recent work includes The Silences of Science (Routledge, 2017).
