Stephen Hawking, and a poll

March 14, 2018 • 12:00 pm

I have to admit at the outset that I’ve never read a single book by Stephen Hawking. Although I know of his accomplishments in physics, including his work on black holes, his idea that the universe began as a singularity, and so on, I never read a single one of his seven popular books (or 5 coauthored books, not to mention his five children’s books written with his daughter). But his willingness to keep on doing physics, despite 55 years of being debilitated by ALS (surely a record), made him a very admirable man.

You can read the New York Times obituary by clicking on this picture:

Most of us know Hawking as an atheist, and that’s how he saw himself, though his occasional and unwise use of “God” metaphors prompted the faithful to embrace him. Wikipedia says this about his lack of faith:

Hawking stated that he was “not religious in the normal sense” and he believed that “the universe is governed by the laws of science”. Hawking stated:

There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason. Science will win because it works.

In 2008, Hawking stated, “The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws”. In an interview published in The Guardian, Hawking regarded the concept of heaven as a myth, believing that there is “no heaven or afterlife” and that such a notion was a “fairy story for people afraid of the dark”.  In 2011, when narrating the first episode of the American television series Curiosity on the Discovery Channel, Hawking declared:

We are each free to believe what we want and it is my view that the simplest explanation is there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, and no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.

In September 2014 he joined the Starmus Festival as keynote speaker and declared himself an atheist.[313] In an interview with El Mundo, he commented:

Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.

Here’s a poll based on the claim that Hawking’s books, especially A Brief History of Time, are the most popular unread science books in history:

91 thoughts on “Stephen Hawking, and a poll”

  1. 1/4 through ABHOT, started when I was very old. Still trying to het back to it.

    Finished The Grand Design

    1. Stephen Hawking was a great physicist, and an inspirational human being. However I’m not a huge fan of his popular books. There are many much better options available than A Brief History Of Time, for example: The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, Why String Theory by Joseph Conlon, Fantastic Realities by Frank Wilczek, Warped Passages by Lisa Randall, and both The First Three Minutes and Dreams Of A Final Theory by Steven Weinberg.

      2. Frank Wilczek is a freaking genius and excellent explainer. I didn’t know he had a popular science book. Thanks for the tip! But I did like a brief history of time.

  4. A Brief History of Time was probably one of the first popular science book that I’ve ever read. It was pretty influential for me.

    1. Maybe you and I are among the few who actually have read it. I had a first edition, and I took it with me on a business trip and finished it on the flight home.

      2. I read it too and thought it was good, I enjoy popular physics books that at least make me think I’m getting closer to understanding the important things in the universe.

        1. I read that book too (I bought it for my kids), in my opinion one of the best popular science book along Einstein and Weinberg books RiP sH!

    3. Me,too.

      His book was the very first of what became many books for me. My copy is full of marginalia and question marks, and things that were hard to clarify because Google hadn’t been invented yet.

      By chance, I was in the bathroom at the Athenaeum at CalTech with Prof. Hawking with his caretaker. we were trying to exit at the same time. I opened the door for them, and he said “thank you”. A very small, very important memory treasure.

      1. Nope. The only links I can find is the Wikipedia reference after the picture (which is the link to the Times piece. No other links show up.

  9. Have read ABHOT a few times. It’s pitched at a pretty good level – you come out of it knowing the “shape” of the physics he’s explaining but well aware that you’re only scratching the surface. I enjoyed it, it leaves you plenty to ponder.

    1. Yeah, this is why I don’t read Hawking books – I don’t feel like I am understanding what I read, except at the very beginning. If you don’t know the mathematics underlying it then all you can really do is look at the words without comprehending them.

  11. Read A Brief History of Time (twice) and The Grand Design. Some things are a bit dated, but they are splendid reads. I especially like the nice pictures in my copies.

  12. I read A Brief History of Time but I’d been reading cosmology since I was six so it wasn’t that difficult.

    I see the Feminist Offence Engine has already started spewing bile on his corpse, what with his cis white privilege and all that.

    2. He forced his first wife to have babies, instead of pursuing her academic career in the lyric poetry of Medieval Iberia.

  13. I have read selected excerpts from books by SH, and seen documentaries narrated and written by him, but no books cover to cover. (So I voted no.)

    He was portrayed in the movies by Eddie Redmayne, but also on a much less seen BBC television movie by Benedict Cumberbatch (before Benny became famous as Sherlock Holmes) and SH played a computer simulation of himself on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, and himself on “The Big Bang Theory”.

    Internet Movie Database has (at least temporarily) discontinued their “character” search feature, so there is no easy way there to check on times he has been portrayed by someone else. (It was a very error-prone feature.) But Wikipedia comes to the rescue with
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking_in_popular_culture

    If I were Hawking, I would have said if there was an afterlife, it’s behind an “event horizon”.

  14. I have yet to read A Brief History of Time. I have it on my shelf, but I just can’t find the …

    2. It is the best demonstration of relativistic time dilation I have ever read. You can literally feel time slow down as you try to read it.

  16. I read ASHOT when it came out. I was very excited to lend it to a friend who promptly lost it. He didn’t offer to pay for it or buy me another copy, so I assigned his soul to the depths of hell without feeling a shred of guilt. Needless to say…

    1. I had a friend who repeatedly borrowed books from me, which he would then loan to other people who he he then lost contact with. The one time I got a book back from him, after dogged persistence, I found he’d rested a coffee cup on it, and used it to press on while writing out shopping lists.

      This is the kind of universe we are living in.

      1. Your story would make the perfect introduction to an explanation of why you had to kill that friend & dismember his body.

        2. I had an acquaintance who borrowed one book off me. When I eventually (after much asking) got it back it was mangled. “The baby chewed it” he said, matter-of-factly and not at all apologetically as if it was a perfectly normal occurrence. I don’t know if he noticed that I hardly ever spoke to him after that.

          In my view, if you damage somebody else’s property, it’s a major issue. Wreck your own stuff.

          cr

  17. I am one of those people who defy the definition of A Brief History of Time as “the most widely sold book that no one read” (or words to that effect).

    I have read it (all of it). When I was in my 20s, if I recall correctly.

    Did I understand it? Only on a very superficial level, which I knew very well at the time. Would I understand it better now? Maybe, I know much more now; but I doubt it! 🙂

    1. Wouldn’t the bible be the most widely sold but least read book? There are copies everywhere but no one seems to know what it says.

      1. But I think people actually do read it. More than have read Hawking’s book. The churches I attended when I was a child made a big point of reading it (selected bits, of course!).

        I have read the Bible: The whole thing and parts of it many times — mainly AFTER I gave up religion!

        Funny how so many religious people think they have all the answers (forever, unchanging (I always ask, “PC or Mac?”)) but many haven’t read these purported answers. They are sure of them however.

        I don’t know if anyone in my immediate circle of friends and family besides myself has actually read ABHOT.

        1. Probably as a percentage of the number of copies sold, more people have read A Brief History of Time than the Bible. In the UK, pretty much every hotel room in the country has a Gideon’s bible in it that has never been opened, so much as read.

  20. I can highly recommend the books that I believe inspired Hawking’s title of ABHOT:

    A Short History of the World, and
    The Outline of History

    Both by H.G. Wells. Wonderfully written. They display the prejudices and missing knowledge of their time (1922, 1919-20); but are excellent nonetheless.

  22. Both TBHOT and The Grand Design (co authored with Leonard Mlodinow.

    Incidentally Hawking (and Mlodinow) are no-free willers 🙂

    From the Grand Design:
    “the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets…so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion”
    and
    “Quantum physics might seem to undermine the idea that nature is governed by laws, but that is not the case. Instead it leads us to accept a new form of determinism: Given the state of a system at some time, the laws of nature determine the probabilities of various futures and pasts rather than determining the future and past with certainty.” Here they are talking of the multiverse interpretation.

  24. Stephen Hawking appears in a classic episode of The Simpsons. There he is, in his wheelchair, speaking in the now familiar robotic tones of his voice generator. At one point, after Hawking says something, Homer responds: “I don’t like that tone of voice!”

    1. Too bad the BBC requires Adobe Flash to see those videos. I dumped Flash a couple of years ago and am unwilling to install Adobe’s buggy/vulnerability prone software on my computer again.

  26. Brief History of Time and Grand Design. I have one of his technical books, but I have not gone through it (requires graduate level differential geometry to understand).

  27. Only The Grand Design. ABHOT and The Universe in a Nutshell are sitting among all the other unread books on my shelves, including one by some fellow named Coyne, who’s not a physicist … 

    /@

  28. I disagree with Hawkins’ claim that “we are each free to believe what we want.”

    We’re not. If you believe we are then you should find nothing silly in the White Queen’s claim that “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

    2. Well then, why not have breakfast at Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

      I only mention that because Stephen Hawking has a cameo as one version of The Book in the latest H2G2 radio series.

  29. Small correction necessary. “…his idea that the universe began as a singularity…”

    It was actually a joint paper with Roger Penrose that put forth the idea. By the time ABHOT came out, Hawkings was in the process of “…trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe…”

    I would also like to recommend reading ABHOT side by side with Stenger’s “The Comprehensible Cosmos.” At least when I did it, a lot of the puzzle pieces seemed to fit together more easily.

  30. I read A Brief History of Time in high school, and later was given A Brief History of Time/Universe in a Nutshell hardback boxed set as a birthday gift from my parents. I’ve also read The Grand Design.

    My background at university is in physics and I didn’t start reading popular books on evolution until after graduation.

    Currently I’m working my way through Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking by Daniel Dennett, and plan on reading some Steven Pinker next even if he spells Stephen wrong. 🙂

  31. I’ve read three of his books: A Brief History of Time, Baby Universes and Black Holes, and The Universe in a Nutshell. As others have said, Brian Greene’s books are probably more readable, but I think that ABHOT paved the way for Greene’s books and other popular works on cosmology.

  33. Even if you have not fully read a book by Hawking, it is worth reading his statement on free will in “The Grand Design”, where he clearly positioned himself against the existence of free will:

    “Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis of biology shows that biological processes are governed by the laws of physics and chemistry and therefore are as determined as the orbits of the planets.
    Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws. For example, a study of patients undergoing awake brain surgery found that by electrically stimulating the appropriate regions of the brain, one could create in the patient the desire to move the hand, arm, or foot, or to move the lips and talk.
    It is hard to imagine how free will can operate if our behavior is determined by physical law, so it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion.”

  34. I’m glad that I live in a time when physicists attempt to explain their work in non-mathematical terms (Hawking, Carrol, Krause etc). My brother, who was a physics major, attempted to explain General Relativity to me when I was about 7. And I think that I got it – at least the kindness of memory tells me so.

    rz

  35. I’ve read A Brief History of Time, and The Grand Design (coauthor). Whether I understood them is another matter…

  36. Stephen Hawking’s greatest achievement that I can understand is his discovery of Hawking Radiation, and it goes a bit like this. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle says we can’t know exactly how much momentum a thing has, and simultaneously exactly where it is. Consequently, the “nothingness” of spacetime, can’t have zero momentum because that is an exact measurement.
    This gives rise to the existence of pairs of virtual particles which pop into existence very briefly, deriving their energy from the non-zero nature of “nothing”, and then annihilating themselves when they collide. But when a pair of these virtual particles pop into existence right on the edge of a black hole, one of them might fall into the black hole before annihilating with its partner, while the other particle yells “free at last” and speeds away from the black hole. From the point of view of an observer, this looks like the black hole is actually radiating energy. So though light cannot escape from a black hole, the black hole nevertheless will evaporate, given enough time. What an amazing piece of deductive thinking!

    1. That pop-sci explanation is wrong. The reason Hawking radiation appears is due to observer dependence in general relativity. The event horizon acts as a boundary to the quantum fields, and the existence of a boundary in the almost-flat spacetime far away from the black hole versus the lack of a boundary in the obviously curved spacetime near its event horizon is what causes faraway observers to see particles radiated from a black hole.

      1. My description of Hawking Radiation is a pop-sci explanation? Who knew? I certainly would never have invoked a quantum description of the phenomenon in a blog where very few commenters (myself included) are au fait with high energy particle physics, or quantum chromodynamics, or even plain old quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman said ‘Nobody understands quantum mechanics.’ The upshot of Hawking Radiation is that black holes can evaporate, which requires that it emits particles, and observers be damned. Does a falling tree make a noise when there is no ‘observer’ there to hear it?

        1. Sorry, a correction on my end: Hawking radiation exists due to an observer having to constantly accelerate to stay at the same height above a black hole. This causes them to observe particles being radiated from the event horizon.

          As for free-falling observers, I assume the explanation is that they’d pass through the event horizon where they would not observe a black hole, so black hole evaporation would be meaningless to them.

          It is times like these that I wish there was a “delete comment” option.

    2. According to Wikipedia the Hawking Radiation emitted by a solar-mass black hole is 10 ** -29W (10 to the minus 29 watts). Also, the black hole will be absorbing radiation from the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). I assume (though I have no qualification to do so) that the universe would have to expand to a point where the CMBR became sufficiently weak for the Hawking Radiation to dominate and the black hole would then lose mass. This sounds like countless trillions of years. Then again – when you’ve got eternity to play with.

  37. I should have said that the virtual particles consist of a “regular” particle and its anti-particle corollary.

  38. I have 3 of his books in my not-yet-converted-to-binary bookshelf, but I can only remember reading “A Brief History of Time”. (In the Swedish translation “Kosmos” apparently, though I later acquired the English original in some anonymous airport-waiting lost in my brief history of time.)

  39. I have read several of Hawking’s books and few of his papers.

    I have a couple of compilations that he did of the great works of physics and maths, “God Created the Integers” and “On the Shoulders of Giants”, these contain the most important works of maths and physics with introduction and annotations by Hawking. They are of course difficult but give one a good insight into how the physical sciences work and have progressed across the centuries.

    1. Are those intros any good? I was going to get those two volumes if I didn’t have other sources for some of the papers. (I collect classics in the history of science – Dover Publications, for example, is great for this.)

  40. I have read several of Hawking’s books and few of his papers.

    I have a couple of compilations that he did of the great works of physics and maths, “God Created the Integers” and “On the Shoulders of Giants”, these contain the most important works of maths and physics with introduction and annotations by Hawking. They are of course difficult but give one a good insight into how the physical sciences work and have progressed across the centuries.

  41. But I’ve read Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Trying to catch up.

  42. RIP to a great and interesting scientist. He was cocky enough to make bets about his theories, and honest enough to pay them off when he lost.

    Coincidentally, Einstein also died at 76. Feynman only made it to 69.

  43. The first time I saw Hawking was on a BBC Horizon documentary – a long, long time ago. He wasn’t a public figure at that time. He used his own voice but it was completely unintelligible due to his disability (it was before he had a voice synthesiser). One of the students accompanying him could understand his vocalisations and did the job of “interpreter”.

  44. Yes, I have read a Hawking book and in 2013 closed the book on Hawking after his academic boycott of Israel (that along with his advocacy of the BDS movement). Hawking’s contributions to cosmology are formidable and he will go down as truly one of the great minds in history. I can’t be counted as one of the aggrieved.

  45. The obituary to read is the one by Roger Penrose in the Guardian. RP influenced SH from the beginning, and can authoritatively pinpoint SH’s scientific achievements.

  46. I’ve read ABHoT. It was given to me by my father shortly after it came out in honour of our “what’s that made of” discussions we used to have (and still do, to some extent).

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