With a title like Hawking Hawking: the Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, science writer Charles Seife must have known his new book was going to cause

How Stephen Hawking became the world's most famous physicist – Physics World

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2021-07-15 14:00:27

With a title like Hawking Hawking: the Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, science writer Charles Seife must have known his new book was going to cause a stir. Indeed, for reasons unknown to Seife himself, his biography of the late cosmologist Stephen Hawking has so far not been able to find a UK publisher. I don’t know why either, but it wouldn’t surprise me if none of them wanted to be part of an attack on a beloved national icon. And the book does claim to be an attack – with publicity material and a video trailer asking whether Hawking’s true talent was not physics, but self-promotion. So I opened this book with more than a little curiosity about the contrast between who Hawking was and who the public believed him to be.

Hawking Hawking begins with a chapter entitled “Next to Newton”, which describes both the position Hawking occupies in the public psyche and his physical burial place in Westminster Abbey in London, where his ashes were interred following his death in March 2018 at the age of 76. From here, it tells Hawking’s story going backwards in time, in search of the person behind the persona, “as the accumulated layers of celebrity and legend are stripped away”.

It is true that a lot of myths built up about Hawking over the years, many of which he happily indulged. Seife describes how Hawking, unlike most academics, actively courted the media, especially towards the end of his life. Anecdotes I particularly enjoyed include his jokey mathematical derivation of the optimal conditions for the England football team’s success in the 2014 World Cup, which he presented for the gambling chain Paddy Power, and his appearances on popular TV shows such as The Simpsons.

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