Hawking biography names the personal flaws colleagues excused — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Graham Farmelo publishes an authorized biography of Stephen Hawking that acknowledges both his scientific brilliance and personal flaws, including bullying, self-promotion, and sexism that were largely ignored because of his disability.
- Stephen Hawking's signature achievements—a 1970 paper with Roger Penrose showing time-reversed gravitational collapse could explain the Big Bang, and his 1974 discovery of Hawking radiation—were largely complete before he became a global celebrity on Star Trek and The Simpsons.
- Hawking's own family members provided damaging testimony: his sister Mary called him "one of the most self-centred people I've ever met," and his father Frank warned the teenaged Stephen "was developing into a selfish character."
- Hawking initially derided Jacob Bekenstein's idea connecting black hole area to entropy, then essentially claimed it as his own after discovering Bekenstein was right—a pattern that "disappointed some of Stephen's friends," Farmelo writes.
- Peter Higgs said Hawking made pronouncements about things "he had no understanding of," calling some of his particle physics comments "total crap"—remarks Higgs delivered knowing they would make uncritically lapped-up headlines.
- Hawking's first wife Jane endured his "authoritarian" demands and indifference to her interests, while his youngest son recounted how Hawking "never let him or his siblings win at board games."
Why it matters: The biography breaks a years-long pattern of suppressing criticism of Hawking—a 2021 exposé by Charles Seife found no British publisher willing to touch it. Farmelo's authorized account finally shifts the assessment, arguing the scientific community must judge Hawking as it would any other physicist, regardless of disability—a position that could reshape both Hawking's legacy and how disabled scientists are evaluated.
Ask SkimNews
