“What a challenge”, said Liz Else in New Scientist. Penning the “first major biography” of Stephen Hawking with the theoretical physicist’s estate and the “whole scientific world” all “watching closely to see the result”. But science writer Graham Farmelo has pulled it off. “Kudos all round.”
Farmelo paints a “comprehensive and accessible portrait” of Hawking as an “extraordinarily determined man” who had a darker side to which the public and scientific community “mostly turned a blind eye”, said Philip Ball in The Guardian.
The “uncomfortable but unavoidable truth” is that Hawking’s refusal to give scientific credit to others, sexism and “controlling behaviour” were largely “ignored because of his disability”. “I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that.”
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Farmelo first covers the science which offers a “genuinely inspirational tale”. Hawking’s work on black-hole thermodynamics would have been “impressive by any measure”. But achieving it while living with “debilitating and ultimately paralysing” motor neurone disease is remarkable.
The “problematic stuff” emerges from “those closest to him”. His friends at Oxford found him “lazy and entitled”; his youngest son said his father never let him win at board games as a child; and his “unsparing ridicule” of the religious beliefs of his first wife, Jane, contributed to the unravelling of their marriage. We also learn how “scandalously bad” he was at acknowledging the work of others, something that became clear early on when he “failed to indicate his debt” to the physicist Roger Penrose.
This pattern of “accepting more than his fair share of credit” certainly “ruffled feathers” in the scientific community, said John Gribbin in Literary Review. But in person he was “gregarious and generous” to his students.
Farmelo gives non-scientists a “good sense” of why Hawking’s work matters, including “succinct discussions of how black holes evaporate” and the “nature of gravitational waves”. But his book also puts the facts into “context”. The result is an “absorbing and informative account of the life of the most interesting physicist of the second half of the 20th century”.
