By Dwight Garner
Published, New York Times: September 7, 2010
By Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Illustrated. 198 pages.
Bantam Books/Random House. $28.
Stephen Hawking, the most revered scientist since Einstein, is a formidable mathematician and a formidable salesman. “I want my books sold on airport bookstalls,” he has impishly declared, and he’s learned how to put them there.
Mr. Hawking’s “Brief History of Time,” published in 1988, sold some nine million copies. (A typical science best seller will move a tiny fraction of that number.) It did so partly by leaning on his preoccupying personal story. Mr. Hawking’s body has been wasted by Lou Gehrig’s disease, while his mind is utterly intact, a pinging black box amid the physical wreckage. It was no accident that Mr. Hawking’s wheelchair and elfin face appeared on that book’s cover — a rarity for a book of serious intellect — rather than on its back flap.
In “A Brief History of Time” Mr. Hawking also dabbled in what the science writer Timothy Ferris has called “Godmongering.” Mr. Hawking, a longtime professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, has hardly displayed a religious bent during his long career. (A memoir by his former wife outed him as an atheist.) But he ended “Brief History” by declaring that the discovery of a unified theory of physics could help us to “know the mind of God.” It was a line that — cynically, some thought — allowed glints of fuzzy sunshine to warm the cold blade of his thinking.
Mr. Hawking’s new book, “The Grand Design,” published on Tuesday, has already made headlines and been a trending topic on Twitter, thanks to a different sort of Godmongering. This time Mr. Hawking has, we’re told, declared God pretty much dead.
The full piece at NYT.
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