Graham Farmelo: Hawking, His Life and Work This is the authorised biography of a truly remarkable person of whose existence I am sure you are both aware, so famed has he become in scientific and popular culture. No other theoretical physicist has featured in The Simpsons, Desert Island Discs, Star Trek and The Big Bang Theory, as well as authoring one of the best-selling nonfiction books ever. These days such fame would only be overtopped by appearances in Celebrity Traitors and Strictly Come Dancing, and I am sure that Stephen Hawking — for it was he — would have wheeled himself into the frame for these, if asked.
Promising but self-centred and lazy, the young Stephen Hawking found himself studying physics at Oxford in the early 1960s when he was diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease (MND) and given only a few years to live. Galvanised by his diagnosis he worked furiously, achieving important discoveries in theoretical physics, mostly about the theory of gravity, and black holes, as well as travelling widely, partying hard, marrying (twice) and producing three children, while in the course of time becoming totally immobile and dependent on others — and living until his seventies.
This is no hagiography, though. Hawking could be selfish, narrow-minded, arrogant, aggressive and a bully, often taking all the credit for discoveries in which he had played but a part, perhaps getting off lightly because of his profound disability. It could be that disability drove him. Would he have succeeded without it? We shall never know.
Disabled people sometimes have to succeed by sheer bloody mindedness, and — as I discovered myself during a short spell after I broke an ankle a few years ago — when you are in a wheelchair, the able-bodied tend to treat you as insensate luggage. Those with a disability that results in difficulties of communication (and Hawking was a prime example) may become, with justification, especially forthright. I have known a number of people who, while able-bodied in every other way, are deaf, and have needed to dispense with social niceties just to get attention.
This book helped me get some vague understanding, albeit at a base level, of something that had previously mystified me, even after two careful readings of A Brief History of Time, that is, the ‘no boundary’ idea for the beginning of the Universe. It’s all a matter of ‘imaginary time‘ (no, me neither).
I remained mystified by other things, though. First, why his long-suffering wife Jane married him at all, even when his MND had been diagnosed (ah, l’amour), and second, after they divorced, why his second wife, Elaine, deserted her existing husband and children and married Hawking, when he was hardly anyone’s idea of a romantic lead, and his sparkling off-the-cuff wit required some preparation. The presence of bruises and some broken bones raised suspicions that the hot-headed Elaine physically abused Stephen, but Farmelo draws a veil over another possible cause. Another prejudice that attaches itself to disabled people is that they have no sex life. Hawking was clearly able to father children, but Farmelo doesn’t go into details. It’s only in The Theory of Everything, the Hawking biopic, when one of Hawking’s friends asks him how he manages it, that Hawking (played by Eddie Redmayne) says that his disability didn’t affect that part of his anatomy. Farmelo does allude in a sidelong way to the fact that Elaine and Stephen shared a bed, so perhaps any injuries Stephen accrued happened during sex. But I don’t know this, because Farmelo doesn’t ask, or if he did, he got no answer.
Motor neurone disease affects motor neurones – the clue is in the name — and not the vast and vastly underestimated and quasi-independent nervous system that controls the viscera — the lungs, heart, digestive system, urogenital system and all the rest of the mixed grill that keeps a body working, but which we take for granted until and unless it does something over which we have only partial conscious control, such as vomit, or have an erection.
More broadly, I’d like to have known more about MND. As far as I know, there is no known cause or cure, and the term ‘MND’ might cover a number of separate complaints. Hawking was, as Farmelo says, an outlier, partly because he got it so young (it doesn’t usually affect anyone under 50) and because he survived so long. As Farmelo says, his life was certainly prolonged by the great care he received throughout his life, including two emergency operations that saved his life, though, as John Gribbin suggests in his review in the Literary Review, Hawking’s longevity might partly be due to his refusal to capitulate.
Was Hawking a sexist, as some have suggested? The jury is out. I’d say that he was a man of his time, having been educated at all-boys’ school, and at what were then all-male Oxbridge colleges, and went to work in a very male-dominated field, so it’s perhaps no surprise that he admitted finding women ‘a mystery’. Hawking certainly loved women in general, and had a lifelong admiration for Marilyn Monroe. If you are repelled by the very idea of a disabled person confined to a wheelchair lusting after Marilyn Monroe, you should perhaps check your prejudices in at the door. Hawking did visit Epstein’s private island, but so did many other people, and it was a very long time ago. Whether, if he hadn’t been disabled, that would have gotten him cancelled, is a matter Farmelo doesn’t address either.
Farmelo’s biography is a great read, and will stand as the definitive meat-and-potatoes account, laying out as much as he can as plainly as possible. Hawking may have regarded women as a mystery, but he felt the same way about the way the Universe worked, and one might say the same about the man himself. The source of his incredible intuitions, his abilities in a sphere that almost everyone finds recondite, how he lived for so long and remained so active despite everything. For now, Hawking has disappeared over the event horizon, to that undiscovered country from whose bourn no information can ever return. Possibly.
