by John Gribbin
“I think the reasoning behind that guy’s comments was pathetic,” Guzzardi recalled with disgust on another occasion. “It was a triumph for a man in Hawking’s physical condition to be on the cover of his own book. It’s inspiring.”
By the summer of 1988, Stephen Hawking’s “difficult” book had stayed in the best-seller list for four months and had sold over a half a million copies in America. He was very rapidly becoming a household name. The publishing phenomenon of the year hit the national news—and every airport bookstall in the country.
In Chicago, a Stephen Hawking fan club was hurriedly organized and started selling Hawking T-shirts. Among the “science set,” he began to achieve the status and commercial trappings of a rock star in schools and colleges from L.A. to Pittsburgh. The schoolboy who had been a devoted fan of Bertrand Russell was now, some fifty years later, himself a schoolboys’ hero.
June 1988 saw the British publication of A Brief History of Time. It immediately followed the same pattern of instant success it had enjoyed in America. Bookshops sold out every copy within days. A few days after publication, one of us (M.W.) searched every bookshop in Oxford and London and could not find a single copy left on sale. Weeks later he tracked down a copy—the last remaining one in the bookshop at the World Trade Center in New York.
British sales reps were reporting overwhelming interest from retailers the length of the country. Waterstone’s in Edinburgh wrote to the publisher to say that they wanted to mount a window display and were planning to order a hundred copies of the book. But despite the obvious interest the book was generating, the British publisher was slow to appreciate the scale of its success. Mark Barty-King at Bantam UK had decided to increase the first print run from 5,000 to 8,000, but these were sold by the end of their first day in the shops. Once again, an immediate reprint was ordered. By the beginning of 1991, A Brief History of Time had gone to twenty reprints in Britain and was still selling an average of 5,000 copies a month in hardback. The book was leaving the bookshelves faster than the printers could produce new copies. The buyer for W. H. Smith was quoted as saying, “Demand for the book had completely outstripped what we were expecting. It has almost become a cult book.”16
Reviews appeared in publications ranging from Nature to the Daily Mail, all of them favorable. Interview after interview appeared in newspapers and magazines. Hawking was becoming such a celebrity that he had to pick which journalists he would talk to.
“It was interesting to see the interviews he went for,” said Wendy Tury at Transworld. “He wanted to do the Sunday Mirror, for instance.”17
Hawking’s attitude was that he wanted to reach the broadest audience possible. He wanted plumbers and butchers to read his book as well as doctors, lawyers, and science students:
I am pleased a book on science competes with the memoirs of pop stars. Maybe there is still hope for the human race. I am very pleased for it to reach the general public, not just academics. It is important that we all have some idea of what science is about because it plays such a big role in modern society.18
Entering the Sunday Times best-seller list within two weeks of publication, it rapidly reached number one, where it remained unchallenged throughout the summer. The book had already broken many records and indeed went on to break them all—staying on the list in Britain for a staggering 234 weeks, and notching up British sales in excess of 600,000 in hardback before Hawking’s publisher Bantam decided to paperback the book in 1995.
People began to stop Hawking on the street and proclaim their deepest admiration. Timothy was said to be embarrassed by such incidents, but Stephen reveled in it. One reviewer compared A Brief History of Time to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.* Family and friends were horrified, but Hawking took it as a compliment—a clear sign that he had succeeded in reaching his target audience.
Reviewers and commentators seemed bemused by the book’s success. John Maddox, the editor of Nature, wrote toward the end of 1988:
Those who worry about the supposed public ignorance of science must surely be comforted to know that in the United States there are now in circulation 600,000 copies of Professor Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time.
Curiously, among roughly a score of people I have questioned during a visit to California (not all of them scientists), I found none who did not know of the book, three who owned a copy and none who had yet read it. This seems odd for a volume of only 198 pages whose author’s estimate of the reading-time can be inferred from his statement that 1,000 calories of nutriment will be required to capture its information content, roughly half a day.
Indeed, there is a strange embarrassment about the book. People say it is a “cult” book, or describe Professor Hawking as a cult figure. In California, well used to the coming and going of gurus differing in persuasions and persuasiveness, this explanation may seem natural. But even California cannot have absorbed all 600,000 copies.19
In August 1988, Simon Jenkins of the Sunday Times wrote:
I am all but mystified. Throughout this summer, a book by a 46-year-old Cambridge mathematics professor on the problem of equating relativity theory with quantum mechanics has been on the British non-fiction best-seller list. For the past month it has been top. Michael Jackson and Pablo Picasso have been toppled. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time has notched up five reprints and 50,000 copies in hardback. This is blockbuster territory.20
Everyone, including many of the people who put it on the best-seller list, seemed startled by the book’s cosmopolitan appeal. It was obvious that Hawking had indeed managed to achieve the accolade of having plumbers and butchers buying his book. There were simply not enough science students in the world to account for the sales figures. One writer recounted a story about a scientist who stopped at a garage in America and began to chat to the service attendant. When the attendant discovered the driver was a scientist, he asked, “Do you know Professor Hawking? He’s my hero.”21 Suddenly everyone was a Hawking fan, and everyone had a pet theory as to how the book had become such a remarkable success.
So what is the secret of its success? It is a question still being asked years after A Brief History of Time took up residence on the best-seller list.
In April 1991, nearly three years after its British publication, a tiny article appeared in the gossipy “Weasel” section of The Independent magazine that questioned how many people had actually read the book:
That brilliant man Mr. Bernard Levin has admitted in his Times column that he is unable to get beyond page 29 of A Brief History of Time by Professor Stephen Hawking. This raises a question: if the brilliant Mr. Levin can only get as far as page 29, how is the average punter likely to fare as he embarks on the quest for knowledge about the origins of the universe?
Yet the fact remains that this slim scientific treatise priced by Bantam at £14.99 has sold 500,000 copies in this country alone, and that come July it will have been in the best-sellers list for three whole years. Understandably, the publishers have no plans to issue a paperback edition.
How does one explain the extraordinary success of a book that so few of its purchasers are able to understand? Amateur psychiatrists point to the author’s condition. He is a victim of motor neuron disease who was given up by his doctors years ago. Yet, against all the odds, he wrote his book. It is a heroic tale, but is it enough to explain the book’s success?
I do not think so. Nor will it do to say that readers hope to discover the truth about the origins of the world in which they live. The word will have got round by now that there is no easy answer. The mystery of the book’s success is by now almost as baffling and fascinating as the mystery of the origins of the universe. I am prepared to offer a small prize (say £14.99) to any reader who can provide an explanation that is at all convincing.22
The article provoked a flood of letters, including one from Hawking’s mother, Isobel, published the following week, in which she wrote:
Sir: I have to declare an interest
, as I am the mother of Professor Stephen Hawking, but I have given some thought to the reasons for the success of A Brief History of Time . . . a success which surprised Stephen himself. I believe the reasons to be complex, but shall attempt to simplify them—as I see them.
The book is well written, which makes it pleasurable to read. The ideas are difficult, not the language. It is totally non-pompous; at no time does he talk down to his readers. He believes that his ideas are accessible to any interested person. It is controversial; plenty of people oppose his conclusions on one level or another, but it stirs thought.
Certainly his fight against illness has contributed to the book’s popularity, but Stephen had come a long way before the book was even thought of. He did not collect his academic and other distinctions because of motor neuron disease.
I do not claim to understand the book myself, though I did read it to the end before coming to this conclusion. I think my age and type of mental training have something to do with my non-comprehension. Without wishing to doubt the brilliance of Mr. Levin’s intellect, I should hesitate to assume from his non-comprehension that most people share it.”23
Isobel Hawking’s last point seems to have gotten to the root of the matter perfectly. While some would consider the classical “Oxbridge arts” education the perfect foundation for later identification as an “intellectual,” there are other forms of education that, as we rush headlong toward the twenty-first century, may be more appropriate for the “intellectuals” of the future. Ask any scientist about the prejudices of the scientifically untrained. Such people make themselves known at any normal dinner party. The sociable scientist has a surfeit of sorry tales of how the uninitiated protect their own ignorance with Levinesque belittlement, almost reveling in the fact that they don’t understand scientific matters. It is often easier to make a joke of things you do not wish to admit to than to be honest and confront them. In Britain, especially, this xenophobia is nurtured by the vestiges of Victorian images of the scientist as little more than a workman dirtying his hands in a laboratory, messing around with chemicals and bizarre-looking instruments.
Among the other replies to the “Weasel” piece was another letter that neatly exposed such misplaced intellectual snobbery:
Sir: You are mistaken in thinking that few of the purchasers of A Brief History of Time are able to understand the work. It is only those who, like Bernard Levin, have had a limited education who have this problem.
My 17-year-old son, a physics A Level student, found the book very easy to understand and wished that Stephen Hawking had written in greater depth. This is a boy who never reads a novel and usually buys only the Sun. He would himself claim the £14.99 offered by the Weasel to those who could explain the popularity of Hawking’s book, but he is hardly capable of constructing a letter.
This bears out the theory . . . that there are different sorts of intelligence. Just as there are philistine scientists there is an arts intelligentsia that is mathematically and scientifically illiterate. Never mind Shakespeare: perhaps schools should be teaching concepts that help one to understand the very basis of the nature of the Universe.24
Despite such forthright opinions, a great many people believe that A Brief History of Time has turned out to be the book to be seen with in the eighties and nineties. Soon after publication, several articles appeared in which the writer commented on the fact that friends and colleagues were in competition to see how far they had managed to get through it. Both the writers of this book have compared notes on the comments of our non-scientist friends (and sometimes scientifically trained ones, too) who claim over dinner that they are trying it “a page a day” or that they are “three pages further on than my next-door neighbor.” Even Simon Jenkins, who displays a continuing high regard for Hawking and his book, waded in with:
Hawking is, I am sure, benefiting from “wisdom by association.” Buying a book is a step more virtuous than merely reading a review of it, but need not involve reading it. On the coffee-table or by the loo, a book is the intellectual equivalent of a spare Gucci label stitched on a handbag or an alligator on a T-shirt.25
Others have claimed that A Brief History of Time has sold so well because it has been latched on to by a lost generation of post-yuppie Greens who see it as a symbol of new-age wisdom, that it somehow takes on semireligious importance in their minds. Of course, Hawking finds such notions hilarious.
So what do Hawking’s colleagues think of his book? If the truth be told, many have not read it, claiming that they hardly see it as a beach read. Among those who have, there are a variety of opinions. A number have drawn the conclusion that Hawking did not go far enough and that the book should have been twice the length, but that perhaps is the professional in them talking.
Some like it; others do not. More than one physicist has said that he felt Hawking was wrong to integrate accepted and established scientific conclusions with his own controversial speculations without informing the lay reader of any distinction between the two. Others believe that Hawking’s insistence on including potted biographies of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein at the end of the book is pretentious—that it implies that the author thought the name “Hawking” would be the next in line in any future A Brief History of Time. This last view seems at odds with the man’s own opinion of the media hype surrounding his status. For he would claim it is they, not he, who have made such proclamations. Others would argue that he has every right to think of himself in the same light as this illustrious triumvirate.
Whatever the reason for the book’s amazing success, it has far outstripped the wildest expectations of the publishers who signed it up, the agent who saw its commercial value, and, most of all, the writer and editor who created it.
The final story of its cosmopolitan appeal must be reserved for a tale from the Russian physicist Andrei Linde. Soon after the book’s publication, he was flying across America for a conference and happened, not unusually, to be seated next to a businessman. Some way into the flight he glanced across and noticed that the man was reading Hawking’s book. Without having been introduced and before the usual small talk, they struck up a conversation about it.
“What do you think of it?” Linde asked.
“Fascinating,” said the businessman. “I can’t put it down.”
“Oh, that’s interesting,” the scientist replied. “I found it quite heavy going in places and didn’t fully understand some parts.”
At which point the businessman closed the book on his lap, leaned across with a compassionate smile, and said, “Let me explain. . . .”
* A cult success of the seventies.
15
THE END OF PHYSICS?
Stephen Hawking is fond of suggesting that the end may be in sight for theoretical physics. Hearing Hawking tell you that physics may be coming to an end became something of a cliché in the trade in the 1980s, as at the beginning of that decade he used his inaugural lecture as Lucasian Professor to pose that question. Thirty years on, the end doesn’t look any closer than it did then, but he is still optimistically proclaiming it. But even if theoretical physics really did reach the “end” Hawking so eagerly predicts, there would still be plenty of work left for physicists to do.
In an interview in Newsweek in 1988, Hawking said that after discovering a theory of everything, “there would still be lots to do,” but physics would then be “like mountaineering after Everest.”1
Other cosmologists, including Martin Rees, prefer a slightly different analogy. They point out that learning the rules of chess is only the first step on a long and fascinating path to becoming a grand master. The long-sought-after theory of everything, they say, would be no more than the physics equivalent of the rules of chess, with grand-master status still far away over the horizon.
The immediate goal of physics—the Holy Grail that Hawking and a few other researchers believe lies just around the corner—is a complete, consistent, unified theory in which all physical interactions are describe
d by one set of equations. To see what this means and how daunting the search for such a theory must be, we shall look at the modern understanding of the way the Universe works, which requires four separate theories to explain different features of the world.
Back in the nineteenth century, only two theories were needed (so in a way physics has gotten more complicated in the past hundred years). Newton’s theory of gravity described the force that holds planets in their orbits around the Sun or makes an apple fall from a tree; Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism described the behavior of radiation, including light, and the forces that operate between electrically charged particles or between magnets.
As we explained in Chapter 2, though, these two theories were incompatible. Maxwell’s equations set a speed for light that is the same for all observers, while Newtonian mechanics said that the speed measured for light would depend on the motion of the observer. This dichotomy was one of the principal reasons why Einstein developed first the special theory of relativity and then the general theory—an improved theory of gravity that is compatible with Maxwell’s equations. Both the general theory and Maxwell’s theory are, however, “classical” theories in the strict sense of the term. That is, they treat the Universe as a continuum. Space, in the classical view, can be subdivided and measured in units as small as you wish, while electromagnetic energy can come in a quantity as small as you wish.
The quantum revolution changed the way physicists view the world. They now regard the Universe as discontinuous, with an ultimate limit on how small a “piece” of electromagnetic energy can be, and even on how small a unit of time or a measure of distance can be. It was discoveries concerning the nature of light that led to the quantum revolution, and electromagnetism was eventually superseded by a new theory, quantum electrodynamics (QED), that incorporates the best of Maxwell’s theory with the new quantum rules.
