A new biography of Stephen Hawking gets to grips with a complicated man

Graham Farmelo’s biography of Stephen Hawking is out later this month

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Hawking
Graham Farmelo (UK: John Murray, out 24 September; US: Bantam, out 24 November)

Is there anything new left to say about Stephen Hawking? The world-famous physicist, who died in 2018, has been the subject of multiple books, documentaries and films, as well as penning dozens of his own tomes. In Hawking by Graham Farmelo, we now have the first authorised biography, and with it access to previously unpublished material from the Hawking family and others. Despite this, his family life is probably the least interesting part of the book – the really compelling stuff is in reassessing his later life.

Part of this is down to a problem common to almost all biographies: people and their families don’t tend to do anything interesting before they become famous for the thing you actually want to read about. The first five of 17 chapters cover Hawking’s life in extensive detail, thanks to detailed documents written by his parents Frank and Isabel, including an unpublished autobiography by the former. But what do we actually learn?

Unsurprisingly for someone born in 1942, Hawking had a fairly typical middle-class post-war childhood. His father enjoyed DIY and sharing a telescope with Hawking, while his mother was in charge of the bulk of the childcare. The family had a near-miss with a Nazi V1 rocket. They grew their own vegetables to supplement meagre rations. All of this is documented and footnoted by Farmelo’s impressive scholarship, and a figure like Hawking is certainly worth of such historical investigation, but a thrilling read it is not.

Material on Hawking’s diagnosis with motor neuron disease and his family’s reaction to the news that he would likely be dead within in a decade unsurprisingly pulls much harder on the heartstrings, as does his growing romance and eventual marriage to his first wife Jane. But yet again, I couldn’t help feel that all of this is well-trodden ground, particularly from Jane’s autobiography and the film it spawned, The Theory of Everything, in which Hawking is played by Eddie Redmayne.

It is only around a quarter of the way into the book, when Hawking becomes a jobbing scientist, that my interest began to pick up. The physics landscape of the late 1960s and early 70s was very different to what it is today, and Farmelo does a fantastic job of immersing you in this world. Black holes, which while still puzzling to us today are mostly uncontroversial, were thought of by many as “the cosmic counterpart of the Loch Ness Monster”, Farmelo writes – meaning Hawking was really sticking his neck out in working on them.

It is here that a distasteful recurring thread first emerges – Hawking’s frequent oversight in acknowledging collaborators. At multiple times during his work in the 1970s, Hawking published papers without naming researchers who, under typical scientific norms, should have been co-authors. Farmelo highlights this, but doesn’t seek to examine the psychology behind it, despite the fact there is a clear throughline with the fame and adoration Hawking sought and enjoyed in later life. Still, the fact that Farmelo resurfaces these forgotten disputes, once papered over in Hawking’s route to fame, as part of an authorised biography should be applauded.

Farmelo’s is not the first revisionist take on Hawking – Charles Seife got there first in 2021 with Hawking Hawking, a book which examined the making of his celebrity and failed to attract a UK publisher, perhaps because it was felt too controversial in his home country. As Hawking’s life passes further into history, I imagine we can expect more.

Certainly, Hawking had some truly ground-breaking ideas about black holes in the 1970s, most notably Hawking radiation, the idea that black holes can actually emit particles and eventually even evaporate. We are still yet to detect Hawking radiation, despite most physicists believing that it exists, which is why he never won a Nobel prize – something that Farmelo explains was clearly a sore spot for Hawking.

But after that, when he catapulted to fame with the famously unreadable A Brief History of Time? As the decades wore on, Hawking’s scientific ideas were increasingly pedestrian or indeed flat-out wrong. As Farmelo points out, he frequently lost scientific bets, most strikingly that the Higgs boson did not exist – a view Hawking advanced when appear as himself on The Big Bang Theory in an episode that aired just months before the particle was actually discovered. Like many of his contemporaries in the 1990s and early 2000s, Hawking was enamoured with string theory and its variant M-theory, a framework for understanding the universe that increasingly appears today to be a dead end.

My own experience of reporting on Hawking’s research near the end of his life bears this out – he would frequently come out with grabby-sounding headlines, but physicists would politely tell me off the record that they didn’t feel the work was particularly new or detailed enough. Farmelo goes some way to acknowledging this in his epilogue, but doesn’t dwell on why Hawking worked in this way. I think it is probably time we did. Was it down to a lack of original ideas, his penchant for fame-seeking, or his difficulties in communicating as his condition worsened, making it harder for him to publish traditional scientific papers? My honest answer, though it feels impolite to say so, is probably all three.

Where does that leave Hawking, rather than Hawking? If you’ve already followed his life in detail, I’m not sure you have much to gain from this book. If you only know Hawking as a celebrity scientist, Farmelo’s book gets you closer to the man underneath, though I would argue Seife did it better. If it’s 2042 and you’re writing a centenary retrospective of Hawking’s life, Farmelo’s scholarship is a fantastic place to start, but I’m hoping between now and then we can continue to decipher Hawking. When speaking of a man who famously held a party for time travellers (an incident strangely not mentioned in the book), I see no reason to constrain my recommendation to the present.

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