Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science

by Michael White, John Gribbin

Overview

Stephen Hawking is no ordinary scientist. Perhaps more than any other scientist, he has broadened our basic understanding of the universe. His theoretical work on black holes and the origins and nature of the cosmos have been groundbreaking—if not downright revolutionary. He has also spent much of his adult life confined to a wheelchair, a victim of ALS. But his physical limitations have done nothing to confine him intellectually or hinder his scientific development. Hawking would already be remarkable for his cutting-edge work in theoretical physics alone. However, he has also managed to popularize science unlike any one else. Today, he is a household name and achieved almost cult-like fame with the release of A Brief History of Time. Although this book is steeped in the complexities of cosmology, millions of people were eager to learn just some of what he had to offer. Science writers White and Gribbin have painted a compelling portrait of a scientific mind that seemingly knows no bounds. Weaving together clear explanations of Hawking’s science with a detailed, balanced, and sensitive personal history, we come to know and appreciate both sides of this incredible man. Includes new updates in Hawking's biography and the recent discovery of the Higgs-Boson (or "God") particle.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681770949
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	01/15/2016
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	300
File size:	709 KB

About the Author

John Gribbin, Ph.D., trained as an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge before becoming a full-time science writer. His books include the highly acclaimed In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, The First Chimpanzee, In Search of the Big Bang, In the Beginning, In Search of the Edge of Time, In Search of the Double Helix, The Stuff of the Universe (with Martin Rees), Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science, and Einstein: A Life in Science (with Michael White). He lives in East Sussex with his wife and two sons.
John Gribbin, Ph.D., trained as an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of several books, including the highly acclaimed In Search of Schrödinger's Cat, and the co-author of Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science. He lives in East Sussex with his wife and two sons.

Interviews

The Collaborator
Why do I write so many books in collaboration with other authors? It's not that it makes things easier (although sometimes it does), and it's not for the money, because you only get half as much as if you wrote on your own. And yet, at the last count I have worked with a full dozen other people on various books. The reason is twofold -- it keeps your nose to the grindstone, and you might learn something along the way.

Douglas Adams once described the writing process as "banging your forehead against the keyboard until the keys are covered in blood." The creative process is hell. But the reward is that after you have been through the hell, you understand the subject better than you ever did before. I guess (although I have no personal experience) that it is like mountain climbing -- the climb itself may be murder, but the view from the peak is breathtaking. You learn more if you have someone to work with (and pinch things from), and along the way you have someone to bitch at when the going gets tough.

My most frequent, and longest-suffering, collaborator is my wife. In particular, we have worked together on books for young readers, where the climb is only made possible at all thanks to the skills of my coauthor, whose day job involves teaching children with reading difficulties, and who knows everything there is to know about expressing thoughts clearly and simply. First, I have to understand the subject myself. Then, I have to make her understand. And then, between us we express it in language that she feels is suitable for the intended audience (this involves a certain amount of "creative tension," which I shall draw a veil over here). And only then, it turns out, do I really understand it myself. This is a totally different process from writing about the same sort of things for adults, who can be assumed to have some initial interest in the subject, or they wouldn't be reading the book at all. For ten-year-olds, no prior knowledge can be assumed. But the essence of collaboration is still the same -- I have learned something for myself.

Which is why I started writing books at all, because I wanted to know about things that were not easily available in books I could understand. For years, I went around telling anyone who would listen that ideas like relativity theory and quantum physics ought to be explained to nonscientists, to give them a feel for the excitement of modern science, and an insight into what their tax dollars are being spent on. And then I got the response, "OK, do it." It proved harder than I thought, but I got there in the end, often with the help of an expert coauthor.

Of course, there are different kinds of expertise. In my collaborations with Michael White, for example, I have been the scientific "expert," and he has been the one who introduced me to a new kind of communication, as befits a former member of a bestselling pop group (the Thomson Twins). It is much easier than in most of my other collaborations to tell who did what in those scientific biographies of Hawking, Einstein, and Darwin -- more or less alternating chapters on life and science provide a pretty obvious clue, and it would never have occurred to me to include Shirley MacLaine and Tears for Fears in the story. But as with all the collaborations, the whole ends up being greater than the sum of its parts, which is another rewarding reason for the enterprise.

The most rewarding of these collaborations (in all but financial terms) are those for young people. The rewards are not immediate, because I have no contact with the readers. But we have been beavering away at this task for just long enough now that we occasionally receive gratifying email communications from 16-18-year-olds who say that they were turned on to science by reading one or other of our books, and are now planning a degree, and a career studying black holes or DNA or something of the kind. Gratifying, but an awesome responsibility; I look forward with some trepidation to the emails I may be getting from those same people in five or six years' time. John Gribbin

Editorial Reviews

A successful merger of biography and physics...—Time Magazine

Immensely moving.  A totally gripping read.

The Daily Telegraph

Intriguing. There are large questions here than the life of even this singular man.

The Times (London)

A successful merger of biography and physics.

TIME