Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work By Kitty Ferguson, Bantam, Rs 799

Intrigued by the hero worship that followed the experimental confirmation of the general theory of relativity, Albert Einstein confessed that he had failed to figure out the reason behind the mass adoration. That was hardly modesty, for he rightly argued relativity had nothing to do with the lives of the people at large. It was Charlie Chaplin who provided his physicist friend with somewhat of an explanation for his puzzlement when the latter attended the premiere of City Lights in Los Angeles in 1931. As the duo emerged from the theatre, they found that a huge crowd was waiting for hours, just to catch a glimpse of them. When the onlookers burst into a thunderous applause, one genius told the other, “They cheer me because they all understand me. They cheer you because no one understands you.”

Over 80 years after that cryptic comment was made, science has got a new superhero. Stephen William Hawking now rivals — or, should one say, surpasses — the stardom once enjoyed by the father of relativity. Hawking’s fan-following can be envied by the Tom Cruises or the George Clooneys of Beverly Hills. Or else how does one explain that even journalists, accustomed to being invited as guests to science meets, had to shell out £4,000 to gain access to one of the conference lectures of this icon? Franklin Delano Roosevelt may have ignored Einstein’s plea to build an atom bomb to pip Adolf Hitler to the post, but Bill Clinton found it wise to host a dinner for Hawking and be briefed on mankind’s fate in the third millennium.

Kitty Ferguson, who wrote Stephen Hawking: A Quest for the Theory of Everything in 1991 and also collaborated with him to produce The Universe in a Nutshell a decade later, has now expanded her earlier book into a 400-page biography of 21st-century science’s biggest celebrity. With laudable skill, she describes Hawking’s oeuvre of physical discoveries, most of which are truly mind-boggling.

Hawking — sometimes with colleagues, but mostly alone — has supplied mathematical proofs for many a cosmic phenomenon. He earned international acclaim when he was 27, showing, along with Roger Penrose, that the universe began its life from a singularity, a tiny point of infinite matter density as well as infinite curvature of space and time. Later, collaborating with James Hartle, he developed the famous ‘No-Boundary Model’, which undid his earlier work, proving that the cosmos had no beginning and could have no end. This startling discovery stood upon another equally bizarre idea: ‘Imaginary Time’, that is, time measured in imaginary, rather than ordinary, numbers. Such numbers aren’t fictional, mathematicians have been using them for centuries. They derive their name from the fact that an imaginary number, when multiplied by itself, yields a negative number — an oddity, but not improbable.

Hawking has also revealed unknown facets of black holes, those cosmic monsters whose behaviour stretches human imagination beyond its limits. They owe their name to the belief that they suck in everything, even light, that happens to come close to them. But in 1974, in a two-page paper in Nature, Hawking demolished that conventional wisdom. He proved that black holes ought to emit a kind of radiation — now named after him — and thus lose mass, eventually evaporating like camphor.

For arriving at what is arguably the most spectacular of all his results, Hawking incorporated ideas from quantum mechanics, the science of the subatomic world, to general relativity, the rule-book followed by the stars and galaxies. These two pillars of 20th-century physics, ultra-successful as they are in explaining the happenings in separate domains, don’t gel well. Yet experts are spending sleepless nights to broker their marriage into a single theory, hoping that it will explain all physical phenomena in this universe. Like many of his peers, Hawking, too, is obsessed by that ‘Theory of Everything’ (TOE), and for a long time hawked that as the pinnacle of human intellectual achievements. Ferguson does a great job of discussing Hawking’s zealous optimism for achieving that goal.

But sadly, she appears too swayed by her illustrious subject’s enthusiasm to entertain any healthy scepticism about it. While assuming the Lucassian professorship at Cambridge — a post once held by Isaac Newton — in 1980, Hawking made the startling claim that the mindsport called theoretical physics was on the verge of an end. Why? Because the TOE was around the corner. Wouldn’t a theory capable of explaining any physical phenomenon make further research redundant, tantamount to going in for mountaineering after scaling the Everest? Alas, since 1980, Hawking has repeatedly postponed the prophesied demise of theoretical physics, saying it would come about before 2000, 2010 or 2015. In between, he has even expressed doubts about the TOE being a viable conception in the first place. Ferguson doesn’t take Hawking to task for such a let-down. Nor does she find anything wrong in his penchant for making headline-grabbing pronouncements on issues far afield from his own area of research, be it the chance of computers surpassing human intelligence, merits of space colonization, or the possibility of god’s existence.

Nowhere is Ferguson’s protective streak more palpable than in her treatment of Hawking’s private life. When, aged 22, he was diagnosed with the fatal neural disease called Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the prognosis didn’t expect him to survive for even a decade. Hawking continued living with the fear that he might die “the next day”. It’s a miracle that such a man could be fêted on his 70th birthday on January 8 this year (he was, however, too ill to attend the festivities). “Astronomers are used to large numbers, but few are as large as the odds I’d have given this celebration today,” said Sir Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, highlighting that miracle. Ferguson’s perceptive portrayal of Hawking’s never-say-die grit against the backdrop of the gradual degeneration of his body — bereft of even thumb movements, he now uses his computer/voice synthesiser only by nudging his cheek muscle — makes for a great read. But that can’t be said of the ‘black hole’ in Hawking’s life: his marital relationships.

Given the media glare around him, it was another miracle that Hawking could steer clear of prying eyes when he divorced his first wife, Jane, who stood by him for nearly a quarter of a century, to marry his nurse, Elaine Mason. What caused the rift? Part of it became public knowledge in 1999 when Jane came out with her memoir, Music to Move the Stars: A Life With Stephen Hawking, in which she wrote in detail about Hawking’s adultery. His terms for continuing with an already-strained relationship was that he would live at home with his family for part of the week, and the rest he would live with his ‘ladylove’. Hawking’s marriage with Elaine didn’t last either. Why? Ferguson’s starry-eyed biography offers no clue whatsoever. Perhaps she didn’t want to risk her subject’s disapproval of her project when it began.

Let’s not second guess the author’s motive. The best that can be said is that this is worse than an authorized biography. Hawking is too colourful a man to be portrayed in simple pen and ink. He richly deserves a ‘warts-and-all’ biography.