Tag Archives: Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking – Kitty Ferguson ***

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It’s apt that I’m writing this review on the train to Cambridge, Stephen Hawking’s home turf. A good few years ago we were taking a young German on a tour of Cambridge. He had no interest in science, but when we saw Hawking trundling along King’s Parade in his powered wheelchair our visitor instantly knew who he was. If you ask a person in the street to name the two most important physicists of the last 100 years they would probably name Einstein, then Hawking. Which is odd, because I wouldn’t put him in the top 20.

That sounds harsh, but I think Hawking is to physics what Katherine Jenkins is to opera. To the general public, Jenkins is obviously a great opera singer, after all she’s always on the TV. But those in the opera world will point out she has never sung a complete role. It’s not that she’s a bad singer, she just isn’t what the public thinks she is. Similarly by saying I might not put Hawking in my top 20 I’m not saying he’s not a great physicist. But bear in mind that well over 200 people have won the Nobel Prize in physics over the last 100 years. I’m just saying that most of those who know the field would have to consider Feynman or Dirac or Rutherford or a whole host of others before they got round to Hawking.

Yet Hawking remains a star. I went into Kitty Ferguson’s chunky biography of Hawking hoping I would understand this better, as well as getting a detailed feel for his work. The two obvious factors driving his stardom are the remarkable story of his having a full working career despite being told he would die in his 20s of his degenerative disease and his media exposure, driven by the huge success of A Brief History of Time which started the popular science bubble – but would Ferguson reveal more?

It is perhaps telling of the subject that I found myself more interested in the biographical parts than the science. It doesn’t help that this is often fairly abstruse – many of Hawking’s indubitably ingenious ideas are speculative and at the edge of our understanding, more grounded in maths than real observational science, which gives Ferguson a real challenge in explaining them. On the whole she does well, but the section on the relationship of space and time near the big bang was very difficult to read. I was also a little disappointed by the obvious omissions of explanation, even in something relatively straightforward like Hawking radiation.

Ferguson tells us that black holes lose energy this way, as a virtual particle pair that forms near the black hole can have the negative energy particle sucked into the hole while the positive energy particle zooms off, reducing the overall mass/energy of the black hole. There are two problems with this she doesn’t explain. One is how a particle can have negative energy – an antimatter particle, for instance, doesn’t have negative mass, so why negative energy? The other is why the majority of particles from virtual pairs sucked into the black hole are the negative energy ones. Why aren’t an equal number (statistically) of positive energy ones sucked in, producing no net effect? These kind of simple questions are often the ones popular science readers like answered.

The good news is that I did feel I had learned a lot more about Hawking’s ideas (if it was sometimes hard work) and about his personal life. The were some insights into Brief History of Time too (I couldn’t believe he got a $250,000 advance for the US version), though not really explaining its runaway success. I found the book genuinely interesting, despite Ferguson occasionally verging on hero-worship of Hawking. There were a couple of minor factual quibbles. I was unnerved to read that the New Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge was built in 1974 as I started attending lectures there in 1973. And the author’s American origins came through in her lack of understanding of British life before the 1960s – she suggested that somehow not having central heating made Hawking’s childhood home ramshackle – but it was the norm back then. These are trivial indeed, though.

If you are genuinely interested in Hawking this will definitely fill in a lot of the gaps in both his personal life and many popular science explanations of his work. If you made an attempt on Brief History of Time and failed, this is probably not for you.

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Grand Design – Stephen Hawking & Leonard Mlodinow ***

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Stephen Hawking has a habit of making big promises in his books that aren’t entirely delivered. In A Brief History of Time, for example, he tells us he is going to answer questions like ‘What is the nature of time?’ (the name of the book is a bit of a giveaway), yet you can scour it from end to end and not find anything that tells you what time is or how it works. In this new book co-authored with physicist, author and Star Trek writer Leonard Mlodinow he promises even more. The subtitle is ‘new answers to the ultimate questions of life’. That’s a big promise.

Amongst the questions the authors give us are:

  • When and how did the universe begin?
  • Why are we here?
  • What is the nature of reality?
  • Did the universe need a creator?

Serious questions and ones that have mostly been traditionally in the hands of philosophers – but Hawking and Mlodinow tell us that philosophy is now dead. (And religion already was.) Science, it seems, can do it all now. Or can it? We’ll see.

This is what they call a lavishly produced book. Instead of the typical rough paper, it’s on shiny gloss paper, with very arty illustrations in full colour. Usually authors are closely involved in any illustrations, but I suspect some of these have been provided by an art director without consultation with a scientist. Just after we’ve read that a solar eclipse is visible ‘only in a corridor on the earth about 30 miles wide’ we get an illustration of an eclipse where the moon’s shadow is about 18,000 kilometres across. Oops. (Similarly the picture of a ball bouncing on a plane to illustrate the relativity of simultaneity totally misunderstands what it is supposed to show, and hence is baffling.)

But lavish production and a big name isn’t enough. We need results. How do the dynamic duo do against the promises? The book concentrates on the laws of nature and makes some dramatic observations. Along the way it provides effective brief introductions to relativity, to quantum theory and Feynman’s ‘sum over all paths’ approach to quantum behaviour, to M-theory and aspects of cosmology, particularly multiverse-based concepts. Introductions is the keyword in this particular aspect – I wouldn’t recommend the book to get a grounding in any of these topics, but the coverage is fine as it goes.

What is much more suspect is the big picture and big claims. Somehow, by slight of hand we get from Feynman’s brilliant approach of taking a sum over all paths for a quantum particle to taking the same approach with whole universe – but without ever explaining how it can be applied on this scale when it doesn’t appear to apply to everyday objects around us (otherwise we should be able to get interference doing a twin slit experiment with footballs, for example). Frequently, theories that are only held by a part of the physics/cosmology community are stated as if they are facts. Susan Greenfield called Hawking’s approach Taliban-like – there are places where this book is physics by decree.

In reality, despite the claims, the book really doesn’t address philosophical questions – and certainly doesn’t dispose of the need for philosophy. Similarly, the attempts to dispose of ‘the need for God’ are sophistry. The book argues that because of the nature of quantum reality the universe could emerge on its own. But there is no attempt to explain where the underlying principle, the quantum theory that brings the other physical laws into being, comes from. All the authors do, if the tenuous ideas they put forward as near-fact are true, is push things back a level.

Fundamentally, then, this is an unsatisfying book that doesn’t do what it says on the tin. It’s very pretty, and does present some basics of physics and cosmology well, but the cod-philosophical wrapping and the vague-theory-presented-as-fact approach mean that it does more harm than good.

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Review by Brian Clegg

Introducing Stephen Hawking – J. P. McEvoy & Oscar Zarate ***

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It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge Introducing … series (about 80 books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as … for Beginners, puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point.

This turned out to be rather more wordy than a typical book in the series – in fact quite a lot of the pages are more like an adult version of a Horrible Science book with quite a lot of text and a single illustration. However, there are still sections, such as one where Hawking appears to be floating in space being interrogated by Alice from Alice in Wonderland, where the surreal images take over.

Bits of the book are very good. I like the biographical parts about Hawking, for example. But I’m not sure if he really merits a book in his right, because a huge amount of the content, probably a good half of it, is not about Hawking or his work, but rather is context. So, for example, pages 11 to 63 (out of a total of 174) have nothing to do with Hawking.

What we do get, apart from the useful biographical bits, is an introduction to his ideas on black holes and singularities in general, his demonstration that the surface area of a black hole shouldn’t decrease and his invention of the concept of Hawking radiation to make the inconsistencies between black hole theory and the second law of thermodynamics go away. We also hear about the no boundary idea that the universe is finite in size but without boundaries (in the same way that the surface of the earth is finite in size but has no boundaries, but with more dimensions involved). But we don’t come across any of Hawking’s more recent ideas. There is a reason for this. The book was written in 1995, and this new edition hasn’t been updated (something that must be difficult to do with this format). Fifteen years is a long time in astrophysics. Trivial example – the big bang is shown as being 15 billion years ago, where the generally accepted guestimate has been 13.7 billion years for quite a while now.

Overall it’s interesting, though I don’t think the theoretical side is explained as well as quantum theory is in the series entry on that by the same author. But being so old, and being on a subject who is very high profile but really hasn’t developed huge new theories in the way of Einstein or even Feynman rather undermines its value.

*Marmite? If you are puzzled by this assessment, you probably aren’t from the UK. Marmite is a yeast-based product (originally derived from beer production waste) that is spread on bread/toast. It’s something people either love or hate, so much so that the company has run very successful TV ad campaigns showing people absolutely hating the stuff…

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Review by Brian Clegg

The Essential Einstein – Albert Einstein ****

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His Greatest Works is a collection of Einstein’s writings spanning approximately 50 years, which Stephen Hawking edited and provided with commentary. What makes this collection so valuable is that it brings together short and long pieces by Einstein that focuses mainly on relativity.

Hawking kicks off with a paper from 1905. One which revolutionized our understanding of space and time. The Second paper, only just three pages long, proposing the equivalence of mass and energy: E=mc2.

For me this was the first time I really understand how this theory was developed and that it didn’t just fall out of the sky. I think this book is an excellent collection of important papers that certainly lives up to the title. However it is a very hard read and you would need a higher level of mathematics.

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Review by Berry den Hartog (Community review)

A Briefer History of Time – Stephen Hawking (with Leonard Mlodinow) ****

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When the original Brief History of Time came out in 1988 it caused a sensation. It was the book to have on your shelves (though there was a certain tendency to admit to not having read it). And it was, justifiably, a great popular science book – yes it got hard towards the end, but it was well worth the effort.

The idea of Briefer History is to repeat the success of the original, but to do it in a more painless way. It’s a mixed success.

In part it delivers. It’s a sprightly canter through modern cosmology and the associated science, and it does it largely with flair and in a highly approachable fashion. After telling us the goal of science is a unified theory of everything (rather a doubtful proposition, but we’ll overlook that), we take a rapid trip from Newton through relativity to the expanding universe, the big bang, black holes, wormholes and all the traditional menagerie of the modern cosmologist. Because the book comes 17 years after its predecessor there’s a whole lot of new material to encompass, which is great, though it does mean there’s not quite the opportunity there might have been to go through the fundamentals from the first book but explain them in a more gentle fashion.

So the good news is it’s an effective look at the whole cosmological picture today – quantum gravity, strings and all (though dark matter/dark energy are rather skimmed over), it has the very positive endorsement of coming from a scientific superstar (the man appeared on Star Trek TNG – what can you say?), and it’s glossy enough to impress the most selective coffee table book buyer. And that’s enough to gain it four stars. But…

But there are aspects of the desperate attempt to become reader-friendly that get in the way in practice. It’s just a bit too glossy (even literally – the pages are shiny picture book pages, which are a little hard on the eye after a while). Leonard Mlodinow was presumably thrown in as editor to reign back any tendency Hawking might have to go off on riffs most of the readers couldn’t follow, but he has also homogenised the quite personal approach that was one of the strengths of Hawking’s original book. And, for a simple guide, there’s the classic error Feynman was always railing against of using labels as if they explain something – so we hear about electromagnetic fields, for instance, with no attempt to conquer the (admittedly difficult) problem of explaining what a field is.

Perhaps worst of the negative side are the illustrations – they smack of an out of control art director. The illustration, for instance, for the idea that people thought the world was a sphere because ships on the horizon appear masts first, shows a ship on the horizon… all in view. It’s a flat earth picture.

Incidentally, Hawking & Mlodinow perpetuate the myth that historically “it was common to find people who thought the earth was flat”. In fact, educated people have known it was a sphere continuously since the Ancient Greeks – the myth of medieval flat earth belief was devised in the 19th century as anti-Christian propaganda. Of course most people through history haven’t had any opinion on the matter, they’ve been to busy staying alive.

Other pictures are less easy to understand than a simple diagram would have been because of all the extra unnecessary detail – a good example is a “ping pong balls on a train” illustration where it’s very difficult to see what the point is. One diagram even verges on the offensive, in a demonstration of the increased attraction from a doubly heavy body by showing a man (Hawking as it happens) “attracted” to a pair of Marilyn Monroes.

This isn’t by any means a bad book. We’ve awarded it four stars and put it in our “near best” category because it will reach more people than arguably better books like Simon Singh’s Big Bang – even so, it’s a disappointment partly because of the übergloss, and partly because Hawking’s personality doesn’t come through as well as it does in the original.

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Review by Brian Clegg

A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking *****

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The one that started it all – at least the phenomenal interest in popular science books. Hawking’s media presence from Star Trek TNG to BT adverts does nothing to trivialize this remarkable book. It’s one of a very few books in this category that continues to fascinate despite the fact that much of its contents stretch the reader further than is usually expected in a book of this sort.

To be honest, this reviewer avoided the book for many years for two reasons.

The first, which really wasn’t justified, was that this was so much a book that ‘everyone is buying’ that it seemed the cool thing to do to avoid it altogether. If that was your excuse too, it has now had plenty of time to stop being trendy, so you’ve no excuse for not getting it.

The other reason it seemed worth avoiding was its reputation as a book that rivalled Joyce’s Ulysses as one that most people never managed to get through because, trendy though it was, it’s almost impenetrable. If this is your reason for avoiding the book – you (like me) were wrong. It simply isn’t true.

Hawking starts remarkably gently, and though some of the contents are baffling in the small scale, provided you accept the standard undergraduate approach of nodding wisely and continuing whether or not you understand the fine detail, you will find that it fills in nicely with only a few gaps left. The most baffling bit is probably the section on light cones, which he doesn’t explain very well, and this may well have turned people off before they got further. He goes on to give some really quite approachable summaries of quantum theory, particle physics and the physics of black holes. I just wish he wouldn’t use so many exclamation marks!

I think the difficult reputation itself reflects the way this book started a trend. The fact is, in modern popular science terms, while not an easy read, it’s quite acceptable – in fact just at the right level. If there’s one small doubt it’s the suspicion that the few autobiographical comments, interesting though they are, are thrown in at the instance of an editor saying ‘put something in about yourself, Stephen, that’ll keep them going.’

The fact remains that this book deserves its place on every popular science shelf, not as a trophy or an icon, but as a fascinating, enjoyable read.

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Review by Brian Clegg