A Brief History of Stephen Hawking's Blockbuster

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Stephen Hawking and colleagues at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s, before the publication of A Brief History of Time.

PUBLISHING A brief history of Stephen Hawking’s blockbuster Elizabeth Leane surveys the extraordinary influence of the physicist’s first foray into popular-science publishing.

owards the end of The Theory of rarely reach the million mark, and are usu- History of Time is not, as is sometimes Everything, the 2014 film about ally much lower. So this is an astounding claimed, unprecedented. There were Stephen Hawking, scenes depict the achievement for a science book aimed at nineteenth-century science blockbusters Treception of his popular science classic, A the non-scientist, and especially for one such as mathematician Mary Somerville’s Brief History of Time (1988). The camera that grapples with the some of the biggest 1834 On the Connexion of the Physical zooms in on a large display of the book in questions in physics — the Big Bang, black Sciences (see R. Holmes Nature 514, 432– a shop window; fans crowd the physicist- holes, a ‘theory of everything’ and the nature 433; 2014). And in 1930, physicist James author, hoping that he will autograph their of time. As Hawking entertainingly related Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe achieved a copies. Future events are outlined in the in a 2013 essay in The Wall Street Journal, comparable reception to Hawking’s book film’s closing titles: the first relates not to he rewrote A Brief History repeatedly at (in Britain, at least); the jacket of the 1937 the ongoing impact of Hawking’s scientific the behest of his editor, Peter Guzzardi at Pelican edition promotes it as “the famous achievements or the challenges of living Bantam, to make it more understandable to book which upset tradition by making with motor neuron disease, but to the sales a lay readership. He later regretted, however, Science a bestseller”. Nor was Hawking of the book, which by 2013 stood at more not further clarifying tough concepts such as writing in a vacuum. The 1970s and 1980s than 10 million. imaginary time. had seen a series of big-selling popular- Sales of popular-science books very As a publishing phenomenon, A Brief physics books, from Fritjof Capra’s 1975

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The Tao of Physics to Steven Weinberg’s 1977 The First Three Minutes, Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980) and James Gleick’s Chaos (1987). The sales of A Brief History, however, put even these best-sellers in the

JOEL RYAN/INVISION/AP shade. Hawking’s book changed perceptions of the market for popular science. Keen to repeat his success, US and UK publishers in the late 1980s and early 1990s invested heavily in the genre. They quickly promoted existing titles (Penguin, for example, reissued physicist Paul Davies’s backlist with rebranded covers); signed on new ones, in some cases with inflated advances; and opened popular-science lists. Bookshops placed slick displays of popular- science titles in prominent positions, and publishing-industry magazines started talking about a 1990s ‘popular-science book boom’. Titles by newcomers to the field such as Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond sold well, as did new releases by established Hawking’s book contributed to his becoming one of the world’s biggest science celebrities. popularizers such as Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. With exact figures dif- recipe could not be repeated, even in his Standout ‘serious’ non-fiction best-sellers ficult to access, it is unclear to what degree own subsequent books. now tended to come from the social sci- a boom empirically existed, but the genre’s Most commentators agreed on what ences, with Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 The profile had undeniably risen. was not relevant to sales: A Brief History’s Tipping Point and the 2005 Freakonomics by readability. Despite the rewrites, it has a Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner achieving HARD ACT TO FOLLOW certain notoriety as the book everyone worldwide success. Attempts to capitalize on the ‘Hawking bought and no one read. There is now even A Brief History did, however, leave another phenomenon’ went hand in hand with a light-hearted ‘Hawking index’ designed important legacy to popular science: a new speculations about the factors that led to it. to measure just how much a particular sense of the cultural capital of scientific Hawking was highly regarded in the physics best-seller is read: A Brief History scores ideas. From the 1990s onwards, space in community, and had been a minor celeb- low (as, more surprisingly, does the 2011 broadsheets that had been devoted to liter- rity to the general public even before his Fifty Shades of Grey). Evidently, the act of ary texts opened up watershed book, appearing (for example) buying Hawking’s book (or E. L. James’s, “Although the to scientific ones. in Nigel Calder’s UK television series The for that matter) says something about ingredients Popularizers began Key to the Universe in the late 1970s. The the consumer’s identity; reading it is were readily to speak regularly disparity between the physical limitations secondary. identified, at cultural festivals. of his disability and the cosmic scale of his Hawking’s Science book prizes ideas was part of his charisma. Few other LONE GENIUS recipe could not were inaugurated, popular-physics books of the period feature, Other runaway popular-science best-sellers be repeated.” funded and main- as A Brief History does, a photograph of the did follow. Dava Sobel’s 1995 Longitude, tained. The lives of author on the front. Simon Singh’s 1997 Fermat’s Last Theorem scientists and mathematicians became suit- As Hawking himself noted, the book’s and Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe able subjects for mainstream films, such as title was also important. Guzzardi con- (1999) all appeared towards the end of the Ron Howard’s 2001 A Beautiful Mind (about vinced him to revise his original sugges- last millennium. It is difficult, however, to mathematician John Nash); The Imitation tion, ‘From the Big Bang to Black Holes: identify any commonality with Hawking’s Game, the 2014 biopic of computing pio- A Short History of Time’. ‘Brief’ is much success, except perhaps an emphasis on the neer Alan Turing; and, indeed, The Theory better than ‘short’ in this context because figure of the scientist, broadly speaking. of Everything. it suggests duration — a human-scale Sobel’s text concentrates on a “lone genius”, A Brief History of Time was not solely interval that produces an ironic, and the clockmaker John Harrison. Singh’s fea- responsible for these developments. But it striking, juxtaposition with the abstract tures one mathematician in its title and cover gave science’s presence in the cultural sphere concept of time. Framing time as a his- image, and focuses closely on another in its an enormous boost: the landscape for popu- torical phenomenon has a similar effect. narrative. The Elegant Universe’s popular lar-science writing was changed irrevocably And in the text itself, rhetorical gestures success was spurred on by its adaptation as by Hawking’s unpredictable triumph. ■ towards fundamental philosophical and a US television series featuring the charis- theological issues — to uncover a theory matic Greene. Elizabeth Leane holds degrees in physics of everything, writes Hawking, would be A few years into the new millennium, and English literature. She is currently to “know the mind however, commentators were agreeing that an associate professor of English at of God” — beckon a NATURE.COM the ‘boom’ had subsided. The large sales of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, broad readership. But For more on science Bill Bryson’s 2003 A Short History of Nearly Australia. Her books include Reading although these ingre- in culture see: Everything, with its Hawkingesque title, Popular Physics and South Pole: Nature dients were readily nature.com/ seemed as much a product of the travel and Culture. identified, Hawking’s booksandarts writer’s established following as of its topic. e-mail: [email protected]