world travel insurance: Telling Stephen Hawking's story

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Telling Stephen Hawking's story

Cat de Lange, contributor

(Image: Duff Ferguson)

More than ten years after she first penned a biography of Stephen Hawking, Kitty Ferguson has gone back to retell the story of his life and work. New Scientist spoke to her about what it's like to work with the legendary scientist, and how he has changed the way she sees the world.

Your background is in music - how did you end up becoming Stephen Hawking's biographer?
It happened as a result of reading A Brief History of Time. My daughter, who was then eight years old, was doing a project on black holes for her school science fair; she and I had a wonderful time dancing around the sitting room pretending we were photons. After that my husband suggested I try turning [what I'd talked about with my daughter] into a book for young people. So I wrote a book on black holes and that's how I first met Stephen Hawking.

So you were writing your first book, which was for children, and then asked Stephen Hawking if you could write his biography?
Yes. I asked for an interview with him about the black holes book, but I was also thinking about writing a biography. One of the reasons I asked for an interview was to ask his permission.

Can you remember that first meeting?
It was scary; I didn't know exactly what it would be like. It was in the evening so his secretary wasn't there, who normally briefs people who are coming to visit him for the first time - you sit beside him, not across from him, you look at his screen, you don't interrupt him, things like that. Nobody told me any of that. But Stephen Hawking made me feel at home and all that was fine.

During the course of the interview I read him some passages from the children's book I was writing and I stopped in the middle of the page and said, "I know this all sounds deadly dull." He said, "It should be fun." I told him my problem was that this was my first book and my editor insisted it shouldn't have any humour in it - funny things like socks falling into a black hole. And he said, "Tell him I said so."

Why do you think that he captures the imagination of so many people?
He has shown that life can be good, things can be done, wonderful things can happen, and it doesn't all have to be when you're in the peak of health when the sun is shining. Things happen in adversity, which can be remarkable. For me, he also changed my attitude towards other disabled people; now I tend to see disabled people and think maybe they have done really interesting things, maybe they will do really exciting things. He's also given me this huge enthusiasm for science. I think I'm very typical of the way people feel about him.

Are you nervous that Stephen won't like what you write?
When I was writing that first book, the last time I went in to interview him I ended the interview by telling him that I realized that in writing this book I was bound to get some things wrong and there were bound to be some things in it that would annoy him or make him unhappy. And I wanted to ask in advance for his forgiveness for that. He said, "yes".

It's the only biography I've written about a living person, and that was interesting because I found you tend to fictionalize them. Every time I would come back and actually interview him I had to adjust things because no, that wasn't quite right, I had fictionalized him.

Is this new book an update of the first biography you wrote?
This is a totally new book, not least because the first one was published over ten years ago and so much has happened since then. One of the things that has characterized Stephen's career is his marvelous way of pulling the rug out from himself. He predicted that there would be a theory of everything by the end of the 20th century, and he reiterated that again and again. Then he said that, no, we are never going to be able to discover the underlying fundamental theory. That's a huge turnaround. But I think for him it's not a matter of about faces or reversals, it's more like he's playing a game of snakes and ladders; when he encounters a snake it doesn't take him back to square one, it takes him off on an even richer path.

At the close of this book I quote something he had said: that he was really just a child who had never grown up still asking How and Why questions and occasionally finding an answer that satisfies him. My husband read my draft and where I had written "occasionally finds an answer that satisfies him" my husband penciled in "for a while." And I did include that in the book as I thought, yes, that's right - satisfies him for a while, and then he's off in a new direction.