Stephen Hawking

by John Gribbin

  Early in 1983, as Stephen Hawking and Simon Mitton sat in an office on Silver Street, Cambridge, discussing over tea the idea of doing a popular book, three thousand miles away a tall, bearded man in his early thirties passed by a newsstand on Fifth Avenue. Stopping briefly to scan the titles, he picked up a copy of the New York Times, paid for it, and walked on. Arriving at his office a few blocks away, he sat down at his desk; he had a few moments to spare before his lunch appointment with a literary agent at a local restaurant. Peter Guzzardi opened the paper and the magazine fell out onto the desk. There, on the front cover, a picture of a man in a wheelchair was staring back at him. Discarding the rest of the newspaper, Guzzardi quickly turned to the cover article, “The Universe and Dr. Hawking,” and began to read.

  Within minutes he was hooked. The article described the amazing story of the crippled Cambridge scientist, Stephen Hawking, who had revolutionized cosmology and had, for the past twenty years, successfully overcome the devastating symptoms of a wasting neurological disease called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. By the time he had finished the article, he knew he had stumbled upon a great story; and, being a senior editor at Bantam Books, he was in a perfect position to do something about it. With the enormous possibilities opened up by his discovery already racing around in his mind, he stuffed the magazine into his bag and headed off for lunch.

  Peter Guzzardi’s appointment was with the agent Al Zuckerman, who was president of a large agency named Writer’s House based in New York City. Over dessert, Guzzardi mentioned what he had just been reading about Stephen Hawking. Zuckerman had read the same article and was already on the case. He had recently heard through a mutual friend, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Daniel Freedman, that Hawking was working on a book. He had then contacted his own brother-in-law, who just happened to be a physicist himself, about the project.

  By the time of his lunch engagement with Peter Guzzardi, Zuckerman had already decided to get in touch with Hawking to establish the state of play. Seeing the human story behind the discoveries and believing that such a book could be hugely successful, he wanted to be involved. Before they left the restaurant, Peter Guzzardi made it very clear that, if Zuckerman were to meet Hawking and discover that he had not already signed to another publisher, he was sure Bantam would like to know about it. On the sidewalk the two men shook hands and went back to their respective offices.

  Six months passed before Peter Guzzardi heard another thing from Al Zuckerman, but the agent had not been idle in the meantime. He had succeeded in contacting Hawking on the point of signing a contract with Cambridge University Press (CUP). He had cut it fine—a few days later, the deal would have gone through and Zuckerman would have had little incentive to get involved. Although CUP would undoubtedly have done a very good job of producing Hawking’s book, they probably would not have been the right publisher for it. Hawking wanted to sell his book in vast numbers, tapping the popular market; as a highly prestigious academic publisher, CUP is simply not geared up for that area of the business.

  Dennis Sciama recalled how he met Hawking on a train around the time of CUP’s offer and discovered that his former student was working on a popular book.

  “You’re doing it with CUP?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” Hawking replied with a mischievous grin. “I want to make some money with this one.”

  Zuckerman managed to persuade Hawking not to sign the contract before giving him a chance to see what he could do. They agreed that if he was unsuccessful in placing the book, then Hawking could always fall back on the offer from CUP, but Zuckerman had a very strong feeling that he could get more than £10,000 in advance and hook one of the big trade publishers. Hawking drafted a proposal for the book and produced a sample section of around a hundred pages, and Zuckerman contacted a number of publishers, including Bantam, in the States. He had decided at the beginning that he would go for a deal with an American publishing company first and secure contracts for publication in other countries at a later date.

  Peter Guzzardi received the proposal early in 1984 and presented it at the next scheduled editorial meeting. He took with him the New York Times article that had attracted his interest in the first place and showed it to his colleagues. They immediately saw the potential of the proposal and needed little persuading that the idea was a good one. By the end of the meeting, they had agreed to make a serious bid for the rights.

  Despite Bantam’s obvious interest, Zuckerman decided to hold an auction for the book. The whole thing was conducted over the phone. He sent out the package Hawking had put together to a collection of major publishers and told them that if they were interested in the book, they had to make an offer by a certain prearranged date. Interested parties then contacted him with their offers and were told if there was a rival offer that bettered their own. They then had the choice of upping their offer or dropping out of the bidding. Toward the end of the auction day, two rivaling publishers were left to compete over the contract: Norton and Bantam. Norton had recently published Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the autobiographical reveries of the Nobel Prize–winning Caltech professor Richard Feynman, and were very keen on the Hawking proposal. The Feynman book had done exceptionally well. To them, the market potential of a popular book by Hawking was obvious.

  As evening approached and the two companies upped their bids further, Bantam decided to take the plunge and make a final—some may have thought hugely risky—offer. Hurried telephone calls flashed between offices and hastily arranged meetings were held to decide what should be done. Finally, Guzzardi was given the go-ahead to make his final bid. He offered a $250,000 advance for the United States and Canada and a very favorable deal on hardback and paperback royalties. As the sun set over the ragged skyline, tense minutes turned into a nail-biting half-hour in Guzzardi’s office in Manhattan. He really wanted this book.

  Finally the phone rang. Guzzardi grabbed for it. Norton had not matched the offer. Subject to Hawking’s approval of a submitted letter outlining what they would do in terms of rewrites and promotional technique, the book was theirs.

  Author and agent obviously had little doubt of the book’s worth and the salability of the Hawking name—remarkably cool behavior, on Hawking’s part, for a man who, for all his fame and earning potential abroad, was in reality in a rather delicate financial state. Peter Guzzardi accepted the conditions and wrote to Hawking with his ideas. Hawking obviously approved, for the contract was signed a short time later. Guzzardi says that one of the things he believes clinched the deal was his suggestion that the book should be on sale at every airport in America. Hawking loved the idea. The fact that his book was with one of the world’s biggest publishers gave him a real thrill.

  Guzzardi first met Hawking after a conference at Fermilab, the high-energy physics research establishment just outside Chicago. He remembers that Hawking was very tired after delivering his talk but was still very receptive and enthusiastic about the project. Recalling his first impressions of Hawking, he said, “The man has a formidable presence. He came across as a very powerful personality.”

  By this time, Hawking’s lectures were always delivered via an interpreter, usually a research assistant who would handle the slide projector and present Hawking’s pre-scripted lecture. The same interpreter acted for Guzzardi when he met Hawking after the talk. “It was a bit like listening to someone speaking in a foreign language,” Guzzardi recalls. “You pick up a sort of rhythm, without actually understanding what he’s saying.”

  Although Hawking was very happy to discuss the book even at the end of a tiring day, Guzzardi sensed that some of his assistants were less than enthusiastic about the whole thing. He feels they resented the idea that their professor’s work was being popularized and that attempts to reinterpret his theories in layman’s language for public consumption would somehow devalue them. According to Guzzardi, this was an attitude Hawking did not share with his students; on the contrary, he was v
ery much in favor of communicating his theories to a general audience. Before A Brief History of Time, Hawking had shown great interest in delivering public lectures about his work and had, Guzzardi feels, a definite sense of mission about public awareness of cosmology.

  After the first meeting, an exchange of letters between Cambridge and New York began in which suggestions and counter-suggestions were made about passages in the growing manuscript. Throughout the long gestation period of the project, Guzzardi sought advice from other scientists and expert communicators to help him understand Hawking’s ideas, feeding back his digested version of their remarks to steer Hawking further in the direction in which he had said he wanted to go—toward a best-seller. Considering Hawking’s commitments to the DAMTP, his busy schedule of talks and lectures around the world, and his family responsibilities, work on the book progressed well. But despite all their efforts, it was to take a further eighteen months before Hawking and Guzzardi succeeded in knocking the manuscript into shape and preparing it for publication.

  There have been suggestions that at one stage Bantam wanted the book ghostwritten by a successful science writer but that Hawking totally rejected the idea. Such notions are completely unfounded. At no time was such a suggestion made by Guzzardi. In fact, it had been Al Zuckerman who had initially proposed the idea:

  I read the manuscript and thought it was very interesting, and that I could certainly find a publisher for it, but that it would not be readily comprehensible to the lay reader. . . . I thought at that time that we should bring in a professional writer to help put the ideas across in language which would be more easily understood. Hawking refused; he wanted the book to be all his. And he is a very strong-minded man.1

  In his role as editor, Guzzardi tried to put himself in the position of the average man in the street buying and attempting to read the book. He tried to convey this to Hawking during their transatlantic correspondence, with remarks like “I’m sorry, Professor Hawking, I just don’t understand this!” Zuckerman has said of Guzzardi’s efforts:

  I would guess that, for every page of text, Peter wrote two to three pages of editorial letters, all in an attempt to get Hawking to elaborate on ideas that his mind jumps over, but other people wouldn’t understand.2

  “I was persistent,” Guzzardi says, “and kept on until Hawking made me understand things. He may have thought I was a little thick, but I risked it and kept on plugging away until I saw what he was talking about.” According to Guzzardi, Hawking was perfectly amiable about the whole thing and showed great patience with him. In his typically modest way, he also claims that Hawking gave him too much credit in the book’s acknowledgments. “I did,” he points out, “what any normal intelligent person would do and persevered until I understood what was going on.”

  Kitty Ferguson, in her book Stephen Hawking: A Quest for the Theory of Everything, has suggested that because of his condition, Hawking’s use of few words in his explanations meant that in lectures and seminars he would often jump from thought to thought, wrongly assuming that others could see the connection. Without careful editing, this could obviously present serious problems in a supposedly popular science book.

  For Peter Guzzardi, the responsibility of editing A Brief History of Time was a very exciting experience. He realized before the contract was even signed that Hawking was the man to write the definitive work on the theory of the origin and evolution of the Universe. It was he who had done the seminal work on many of the new ideas at the heart of the subject. Who could have been more suited to the task? The manuscript was from the horse’s mouth. Guzzardi is from the school of thought that proposes Hawking as the Einstein of the latter half of the twentieth century. Although he is not himself a scientist, through their collaboration on the book he undoubtedly grew to know Hawking and his way of thinking very well. His understanding of the man is very different to the way his students and professional associates understand him, but perhaps equal in depth.

  To many, Hawking is not the hero the public seems to have made him. There are those who suggest that he is melodramatic at conferences, that he is pretentious and showy, that his constant questioning is affected and deliberately argumentative.

  The physicist and popular writer Paul Davies pointed out that there could be few things more intimidating than for Hawking to come crashing through the doors of a lecture theater five minutes after an inexperienced speaker has begun to talk. Even worse were the occasions when he decided to leave before the end of a lecture and went careering along the aisle, accelerating his motorized wheelchair straight toward the swing doors at the back of the room. But Davies admits:

  Often, it is simply that Stephen is hungry or has remembered that he must phone someone urgently. His lateness is always unintentional and not done to intimidate, but fortunately it hasn’t happened to me—yet!

  There are those who do not view Hawking’s antics and celebrity so kindly. One theorist has been quoted as saying, “He’s working on the same things everybody else is. He just receives a lot of attention because of his condition.”3

  Do Hawking’s critics have a point, or are such statements simply sour grapes over the hype surrounding him? Hawking’s own opinion on people comparing him with Einstein is typically brash: “You shouldn’t believe everything you read,” he says with an ambiguous smile.4

  Finishing the first draft took up most of 1984. It was the year a bomb planted in the Grand Hotel in Brighton nearly killed the British Cabinet, and the prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her own bodyguards in the garden of her New Delhi home.

  As the months passed and Hawking juggled his commitments, the manuscript grew and the stack of correspondence with his editor expanded apace. In the world at large, a baboon’s heart was transplanted into a fifteen-day-old baby, Bishop Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize, and toward the close of the year Ronald Reagan was reelected as U.S. president.

  The first draft of the manuscript was completed by Christmas, and work on rewrites began in the New Year. The exchange of letters between Hawking in Cambridge and Guzzardi in Manhattan became even more frenetic as the deadline approached.

  The trade press got wind of the book soon after Christmas 1984 but appeared to be nonplussed by seemingly misplaced enthusiasm at Bantam:

  Is it the imminence of spring, or is the new enthusiasm we detect genuine? Everywhere we hear the sound of feet jumping up and down in sheer elation over some pet project. At Bantam, Peter Guzzardi is jumping for joy over the acquisition of Stephen Hawking’s From the Big Bang to Black Holes. . . . Paying what Guzzardi calls “significant six figures, definitely above $100,000,” Bantam has plans to publish the book in hardcover “sometime in 1986.” . . . “It’s a great book to have,” enthuses Peter. “Hawking is on the cutting edge of what we know about the cosmos. This whole business of the unified field theory, the conjunction of relativity with quantum mechanics, is comparable to the search for the Holy Grail.”5

  The mid-eighties were indeed a time of growing optimism. As the major nations of the world dragged themselves out of recession, markets began to expand and all sectors of business were on the up. It was the era of the yuppie. The “city slicker” emerged metamorphosed from the post-hippy hibernation of the seventies, cast off the clinging remnants of introspection and integrity, and jumped into a Porsche 911 convertible.

  Newly elected right-wing governments were in power in the major industrialized nations, and you could almost smell the odor of growing confidence in the spring air. Life was good; no one had noticed the swelling bass note of overexpansion and downturn. Share prices in champagne and designer labels rocketed, and big publishing deals became part of the norm.

  In July 1985, Hawking decided to spend some time at CERN, the European organization for nuclear research in Geneva. There he could continue with his fundamental research and also allow himself time to devote to what he described to friends as “a popular book.” He rented an apartment in the city where he was looked af
ter by a full-time nurse and his research assistant at the time, a French Canadian named Raymond Laflamme. Jane, in the meantime, had decided to tour Germany to visit friends. The couple planned to meet up in Bayreuth to attend the Wagner Festival in August, after Stephen had completed the rewrites for the book.

  One evening at the beginning of August, Hawking retired to bed late after a long day making corrections to the manuscript. His nurse helped him into bed and sat down to relax in an adjoining room. After finishing a magazine article, she would begin her routine of checking her patient every half-hour throughout the night. Around 3 A.M., the nurse walked into Hawking’s room to find him awake and having problems breathing. His face had turned violet, and he was making a gurgling sound in his throat. She immediately alerted Laflamme, and an ambulance was called.

  Hawking was rushed to the Cantonal Hospital in Geneva, where he was immediately put on a ventilator. Legend has it that it was thanks to television that the doctor in charge of receiving the crippled scientist at the hospital saved Hawking’s life. Shortly before Hawking had become one of his patients, he had just happened to watch a TV program about a Cambridge physicist who suffered from ALS. Knowing Hawking’s condition, he knew which drugs he could and could not give to his patient. A doctor who had not been fortunate enough to catch the program may well have killed him unintentionally.

  Hawking was rushed to intensive care, and the authorities at CERN were notified. The division leader, Dr. Maurice Jacob, arrived at the hospital before dawn and was informed that things were touch and go. It was thought that Hawking had suffered a blockage in his windpipe and was suspected of having contracted pneumonia. ALS sufferers are more susceptible to the disease than others; in many cases it proves to be fatal. Maurice Jacob and his staff immediately tried to contact Jane, but that proved no easy matter. She was traveling from city to city and had left a series of telephone numbers with Stephen’s nurse. The problem was that no one was absolutely sure of her schedule. Frantic calls were made to various private numbers in Germany, until she was finally tracked down at a friend’s house near Bonn.