IAN BERRY/MAGNUM PHOTOS
COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS
Stephen Hawking and colleagues at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s, before the publication of A Brief History of Time.
P UBLISHING
A brief history of Stephen
Hawking’s blockbuster
Elizabeth Leane surveys the extraordinary influence of the physicist’s first foray into
popular-science publishing.
T
owards the end of The Theory of
Everything, the 2014 film about
Stephen Hawking, scenes depict the
reception of his popular science classic, A
Brief History of Time (1988). The camera
zooms in on a large display of the book in
a shop window; fans crowd the physicistauthor, hoping that he will autograph their
copies. Future events are outlined in the
film’s closing titles: the first relates not to
the ongoing impact of Hawking’s scientific
achievements or the challenges of living
with motor neuron disease, but to the sales
of the book, which by 2013 stood at more
than 10 million.
Sales of popular-science books very
rarely reach the million mark, and are usually much lower. So this is an astounding
achievement for a science book aimed at
the non-scientist, and especially for one
that grapples with the some of the biggest
questions in physics — the Big Bang, black
holes, a ‘theory of everything’ and the nature
of time. As Hawking entertainingly related
in a 2013 essay in The Wall Street Journal,
he rewrote A Brief History repeatedly at
the behest of his editor, Peter Guzzardi at
Bantam, to make it more understandable to
a lay readership. He later regretted, however,
not further clarifying tough concepts such as
imaginary time.
As a publishing phenomenon, A Brief
History of Time is not, as is sometimes
claimed, unprecedented. There were
nineteenth-century science blockbusters
such as mathematician Mary Somerville’s
1834 On the Connexion of the Physical
Sciences (see R. Holmes Nature 514, 432–
433; 2014). And in 1930, physicist James
Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe achieved a
comparable reception to Hawking’s book
(in Britain, at least); the jacket of the 1937
Pelican edition promotes it as “the famous
book which upset tradition by making
Science a bestseller”. Nor was Hawking
writing in a vacuum. The 1970s and 1980s
had seen a series of big-selling popularphysics books, from Fritjof Capra’s 1975
2 8 | N AT U R E | VO L 5 4 1 | 5 JA N UA RY 2 0 1 7
.
d
e
v
r
e
s
e
r
s
t
h
g
i
r
l
l
A
.
e
r
u
t
a
N
r
e
g
n
i
r
p
S
f
o
t
r
a
p
,
d
e
t
i
m
i
L
s
r
e
h
s
i
l
b
u
P
n
a
l
l
i
m
c
a
M
6
1
0
2
©
JOEL RYAN/INVISION/AP
BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT
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
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 popularscience 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
popularizers such as Stephen Jay Gould and
Richard Dawkins. With exact figures difficult to access, it is unclear to what degree
a boom empirically existed, but the genre’s
profile had undeniably risen.
HARD ACT TO FOLLOW
Attempts to capitalize on the ‘Hawking
phenomenon’ went hand in hand with
speculations about the factors that led to it.
Hawking was highly regarded in the physics
community, and had been a minor celebrity to the general public even before his
watershed book, appearing (for example)
in Nigel Calder’s UK television series The
Key to the Universe in the late 1970s. The
disparity between the physical limitations
of his disability and the cosmic scale of his
ideas was part of his charisma. Few other
popular-physics books of the period feature,
as A Brief History does, a photograph of the
author on the front.
As Hawking himself noted, the book’s
title was also important. Guzzardi convinced him to revise his original suggestion, ‘From the Big Bang to Black Holes:
A Short History of Time’. ‘Brief ’ is much
better than ‘short’ in this context because
it suggests duration — a human-scale
interval that produces an ironic, and
striking, juxtaposition with the abstract
concept of time. Framing time as a historical phenomenon has a similar effect.
And in the text itself, rhetorical gestures
towards fundamental philosophical and
theological issues — to uncover a theory
of everything, writes Hawking, would be
to “know the mind
of God” — beckon a
NATURE.COM
broad readership. But For more on science
although these ingre- in culture see:
dients were readily nature.com/
identified, Hawking’s booksandarts
Hawking’s book contributed to his becoming one of the world’s biggest science celebrities.
recipe could not be repeated, even in his
own subsequent books.
Most commentators agreed on what
was not relevant to sales: A Brief History’s
readability. Despite the rewrites, it has a
certain notoriety as the book everyone
bought and no one read. There is now even
a light-hearted ‘Hawking index’ designed
to measure just how much a particular
best-seller is read: A Brief History scores
low (as, more surprisingly, does the 2011
Fifty Shades of Grey). Evidently, the act of
buying Hawking’s book (or E. L. James’s,
for that matter) says something about
the consumer’s identity; reading it is
secondary.
LONE GENIUS
Other runaway popular-science best-sellers
did follow. Dava Sobel’s 1995 Longitude,
Simon Singh’s 1997 Fermat’s Last Theorem
and Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe
(1999) all appeared towards the end of the
last millennium. It is difficult, however, to
identify any commonality with Hawking’s
success, except perhaps an emphasis on the
figure of the scientist, broadly speaking.
Sobel’s text concentrates on a “lone genius”,
the clockmaker John Harrison. Singh’s features one mathematician in its title and cover
image, and focuses closely on another in its
narrative. The Elegant Universe’s popular
success was spurred on by its adaptation as
a US television series featuring the charismatic Greene.
A few years into the new millennium,
however, commentators were agreeing that
the ‘boom’ had subsided. The large sales of
Bill Bryson’s 2003 A Short History of Nearly
Everything, with its Hawkingesque title,
seemed as much a product of the travel
writer’s established following as of its topic.
Standout ‘serious’ non-fiction best-sellers
now tended to come from the social sciences, with Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 The
Tipping Point and the 2005 Freakonomics by
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner achieving
worldwide success.
A Brief History did, however, leave another
important legacy to popular science: a new
sense of the cultural capital of scientific
ideas. From the 1990s onwards, space in
broadsheets that had been devoted to literary texts opened up
“Although the
to scientific ones.
ingredients
Popularizers began
were readily
to speak regularly
identified,
at cultural festivals.
Hawking’s
Science book prizes
recipe could not
were inaugurated,
funded and mainbe repeated.”
tained. The lives of
scientists and mathematicians became suitable subjects for mainstream films, such as
Ron Howard’s 2001 A Beautiful Mind (about
mathematician John Nash); The Imitation
Game, the 2014 biopic of computing pioneer Alan Turing; and, indeed, The Theory
of Everything.
A Brief History of Time was not solely
responsible for these developments. But it
gave science’s presence in the cultural sphere
an enormous boost: the landscape for popular-science writing was changed irrevocably
by Hawking’s unpredictable triumph. ■
Elizabeth Leane holds degrees in physics
and English literature. She is currently
an associate professor of English at
the University of Tasmania in Hobart,
Australia. Her books include Reading
Popular Physics and South Pole: Nature
and Culture.
e-mail: elizabeth.leane@utas.edu.au
5 JA N UA RY 2 0 1 6 | VO L 5 4 1 | N AT U R E | 2 9
.
d
e
v
r
e
s
e
r
s
t
h
g
i
r
l
l
A
.
e
r
u
t
a
N
r
e
g
n
i
r
p
S
f
o
t
r
a
p
,
d
e
t
i
m
i
L
s
r
e
h
s
i
l
b
u
P
n
a
l
l
i
m
c
a
M
6
1
0
2
©