Dara Ó Briain was among the many high achievers who felt deeply inadequate in the presence of Prof Stephen Hawking. “It’s very difficult not to talk like an idiot in front of you,” the Bray comedian (and UCD maths graduate) admitted when making a BBC documentary about his childhood hero in 2015. After several meetings with this “impish, geeky, flirty, curious, stubborn” character, however, Ó Briain declared “the greatest achievement he has is his humanity”.
Graham Farmelo’s suitably heavyweight authorised biography reaches a similar conclusion. Few of us completely understand Hawking’s groundbreaking discoveries about general relativity and quantum mechanics, but everyone knows he communicated them through an American-accented synthesiser while confined to a wheelchair by motor neuron disease. Given just two years to live at 21, he clocked up another 55 that included appearing in Star Trek, performing The Galaxy Song with Monty Python and boasting, “I’ve sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex”.
As well as being granted access to Hawking’s family archives, Farmelo has carried out wide-ranging interviews with his friends and colleagues. This allows him to construct a warm, intimate, slightly plodding narrative full of revealing domestic details. His research extends to how much Hawking’s “misfit” parents paid for their first London house (£1,100 in 1943), what curry he most enjoyed (chicken jalfrezi) and which Beatles album made him dance (A Hard Day’s Night).
While Farmelo clearly admires his subject and calls him “Stephen” throughout, this is no hagiography. He cites many examples of the scientific genius displaying “annoyingly haughty” behaviour, humiliating his stoical first wife Jane and stealing ideas from fellow researchers. “I do wish [Stephen’s two sisters] could have some good fortune as well,” his mother once wrote. “They really are much nicer people!”
Eddie Redmayne played Hawking in the 2014 biopic The Theory of Everything and recalled his verdict as: “There should have been more physics, fewer feelings.” Happily, Farmelo’s book has plenty of both. Tactful accounts of Hawking’s two messy divorces are interspersed with rather more user-friendly guides to our expanding universe than can be found in his widely bought but little-read A Brief History of Time.
Like Hawking’s beloved black holes, putting his life under such a powerful microscope inevitably has a demystifying effect. This sensitive but by no means starry-eyed portrait still leaves his towering reputation largely intact.
Andrew Lynch is a freelance critic
