When Stephen Hawking, who died this week at 76, dreamed up the concept for his hit book A Brief History of Time, he wanted it to be so accessible, readers could find it in an airport or grocery store. He worked with agent Al Zuckerman—who has represented best-sel
Human understanding about the natural world has changed immeasurably in the last 150 years. Before the germ theory of disease, when evolution was hotly debated and medicine was an imprecise science, we depended on brilliant minds to make advances and attempt to explain them to the rest of us. Now that Einstein’s great discoveries are taught in high-school science class, and the concerns with nuclear weapons are more political than scientific, what happens in laboratories is less obvious, but breakthroughs still come along. A handful of scientists have tried to bridge the gap between the lab and the public, and became fixtures of our imaginations in the process.
Hawking was the most well known of these figures, if only because A Brief History of Time is arguably the best-selling scientific book of all time; according to Hawking’s memoir, My Brief History, the book has sold more than 10 million copies since it was released. It’s also referred to as the most popular book that no one actually read. People pick it up, find it confusing, and put it down. Historian Beth Luey wittily pointed out that informal surveys show “most people quit at chapter 4, where Hawking moves into the fourth dimension.” Even Hawking himself admitted that some copies might simply be intended solely as coffee-table decoration.
Contemporary reviews provide insight into why the book might have taken off despite its complications. “Though it contains several dense passages dealing with ‘imaginary time,’ ‘string theories,’ and ‘inflationary’ models of the universe, which this reader (who never got beyond trigonometry in school) found impossible to follow, A Brief History of Time is, on the whole, a lively and provocative book,” wrote Michiko Kakutani in a review for The New York Times. Her assessment, like many others, makes note of Hawking’s diagnosis with Lou Gehrig’s disease. It’s impossible to deny that what Hawking called the “human-interest” aspect of his story drove initial interest in the book, but plenty of consumers stuck around to listen to Hawking’s attempt to find an elegant solution to the universe.As Hawking’s original title implies, A Brief History of Time walks a reader from the Big Bang through to research about black holes and other contemporary problems left in its wake. Though the Big Bang—the concept that the universe started in an instantaneous explosion of sorts—is commonplace today, when Hawking began his scientific career, it was only one of multiple theories about how the universe began. When astrophysicist Fred Hoyle coined the phrase “Big Bang” in 1949, he meant it as a derisive joke, as he was a supporter of another theory. Yet the name stuck in spite of—or perhaps because of—the reference it makes to sex.
The discipline Hawking was famous for popularizing is called cosmology, where experimental and theoretical physicists hunt for evidence for how the universe came to be. Its practitioners develop ever-more sensitive telescopes, and design theories to connect what we can observe now to hypotheses of how it all began. Hawking was famous for revolutionary theorizing on black holes, another idea so common in modern science fiction that it feels familiar even though it is strange.
A Brief History of Time was the first time Hawking, and the emotional story of his biography, reached the general public. His scientific celebrity likely dates back to a paper about black holes that was published in a 1974 issue of the scientific journal Nature, which solved an important contradiction and paved the way for a better understanding of the potential Big Bang. An early mention of him in the science pages of The New York Times ran with the headline “IS THERE A PAST IN THE FUTURE?”, recounting a scientific lecture Hawking delivered about the effect an expanding universe would have on our perception of time.
After his book was released in 1988, however, Hawking went mainstream. He made multiple appearances on The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory in the next few decades, once memorably finding an arithmetic mistake in the work of haughty super-genius Sheldon. He enthusiastically responded to reporters’ requests for comment, weighing in on topics from the state of British politics (he was a Labour voter) to the possibility that One Direction still dances on in a parallel universe.
His scientific legacy is a confounding one, and people will probably spend the rest of their lives trying to pull everything they can out of the things Hawking figured out. His cultural legacy has more to do with the unfamiliarity of his subject matter and the longevity of his life in the spotlight. A Brief History of Time was certainly not the first science best-seller, but it was definitely one of the first to take a theoretical question about the use of mathematics and attempt to break it down clearly without tying it to hot-button issues.
The idea of a popular book about science aimed at an educated, but non-specialist audience is thought to date back to the postwar era in America, when the G.I. Bill led to an explosion in the ranks of the college-educated. Many of the first books to sell well in that period were about anthropology, fossils, and the history of the human race. Interest in astronomy surged once space exploration became an American focus. An earlier scientist to win broad name recognition in this postwar era was Carl Sagan, whose documentary Cosmos was first broadcast in 1980. Like Hawking, Sagan was a legitimate presence in the scientific community, noted for his open mind and probing questions. Yet his presence in the culture owed much to the fact that he was a great educator, and had charm and political skill. He trained a small generation of scientists and lobbied politicians to support forward-thinking NASA missions. His fame accelerated the trend of thinking about science as a lifestyle rather than just a career path.
Hawking and his fame represented a shift in the way we think about what a scientist is, not only for his disabilities, but also because of the intangible way he thought about experimentation. In his memoir he wrote, “I think in pictorial terms, and my aim in the book was to describe these mental images in words, with the help of familiar analogies and a few diagrams.” Hawking’s methods are more like an artist’s than someone who gazes through a telescope, and his lasting contribution, along with Sagan, is to remind general audiences how much the universe could feel like a myth or a painting.
New metaphors for space and the perception of time altered the way regular people interact with the culture of science. And A Brief History of Time proved that there is a vast hunger among “normies” to understand how science works. Nerd culture doesn’t just have to be the province of the nerds. He—and the scientists who have followed his lead, from Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Brian Greene to Carlo Rovelli and many more—altered what science means to all of us. Hawking came about in an era when physics was used for bomb building and spaceship launches, and ushered us to an era where physics could be used for philosophy and poetry.