1.3 The Writer

He published frequent articles in scholarly journals, thought they offered more prestige than payment. Simon Mitton, Hawking's editor at Cambridge University Press, had long encouraged him to write a book to help ordinary folk “make sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it, and where did it and we come from?” as Hawking would later explain in the introduction to his best-seller, A Brief History of Time (From the Big Bang to Black Holes).
Alas, Cambridge University Press could offer only pocket change for the book when Hawking finally consented to write it. Fortunately, however, there was soon a serious American offer on the table: $250,000. Both a book agent and an editor at Bantam had read of Hawking in a Sunday newspaper. Although they knew little about physics, the marketing types sensed that the indomitable scientist's struggle to overcome his disability would pique interest in the book. A Brief History of Time reached the best-seller list in 1988 and stayed there for a publishing eternity, more than two years. It has sold at least eight million copies and made its author a rich man, bringing him at least $6 million.

A Brief History of Time was one of the first celebrity blockbusters in which the author was more important than the text. It hardly mattered if anyone read a word of the book (which many didn't, as it consists mainly of complicated scientific theory); the public was captivated by Hawking himself. With charm and humor that shone through his frozen facial features, the once obscure professor became a media darling, and got to meet the queen of England, Steven Spielberg, and Shirley MacLaine. He made the covers of magazines, starred in documentaries about his books, and even appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (In a guest spot on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Hawking played poker with Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and series regular Data.)
Hawking became a star not only because of his book sales, but because the public responded to his wit (“Scientists and prostitutes get paid for doing what they enjoy.”) and felt compassion for his plight.

Even in rivalry-prone scientific circles, Hawking's colleagues were starstruck. “It was a little like being granted an audience with the Dalai Lama,” gushed astronomer Russ Sampson, who witnessed one visit Hawking made to a campus in the remote reaches of Alberta, Canada. “For two hours we were hanging on Hawking's every word, hoping to learn the secrets of the universe.”
However, the book that started all this-the one supposedly for “ordinary folk”-is hardly accessible to the average reader pondering his or her place in space and time. Consider one sentence: "However, in 1964 two more Americans, J.W. Cronin and Val Fitch, discovered that even the CP symmetry was not obeyed in the decay of certain particles called K-mesons." Hawking not only mixes and matches different scientific fields, but jumps back and forth between centuries. In one breath, he moves from 1800 to 1970; in the next, he leaps from Aristotle to Cal Tech. In fact, some critics have gone so far as to suggest that the book was more likely to confuse readers than to clarify scientific matters for them...

He later cowrote (with Roger Penrose) The Nature of Space and Time (1996), wrote Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993), published The Universe in a Nutshell in 2002 and The Illustrated Theory of Everything in 2004.
In 1992, the American filmmaker Errol Morris made A Brief History of Time into a film about Hawking’s life and work. (Benedict Cumberbatch was quite brilliant as Hawking, turning in a mime of his body failing under his flailing fringe that was profoundly lacking in self-pity. But he was helped by his fellow actors also not being required to go misty-eyed. Lisa Dillon as his fiancée, Jane, looked genuinely puzzled by her decision to marry him. It was a rather beautiful film, not just because it was shot in Cambridge sunshine, but because there was so much goodwill going around and so little false sentiment.)