How Hawking became the "sage" of science

— -- So who says nobody cares about science? One 67-year-old theoretical physicist visits the hospital last week and the world goes nuts.

"Been quite busy here," says Gregory Hayman, a spokesman for the University of Cambridge, where Stephen Hawking has since 1979 held the mathematics post once occupied by Isaac Newton.

Hawking's illness — he remains in Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, England — made news worldwide. "Our impression is that he is still recovering, and there certainly has been a lot of attention," Hayman said Friday.

Why so much attention to a theoretical physicist, one whose best-known book, A Brief History of Time, was published in 1988? Hawking has never won a Nobel Prize, did much of his work on the Big Bang three decades ago with another physicist, Roger Penrose, and planned to step down from his post this year.

Of course, he also has appeared in cartoon form on The Simpsons, in person on Star Trek, and on the pages of British tabloids. All this fame, for a man afflicted with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), bound to a wheelchair and reliant on a computer synthesizer to speak since a 1985 tracheotomy to treat severe pneumonia. His 2007 zero-gravity ride on a NASA airplane made headlines, as did his call for colonizing space afterwards.

"I think there needs to be such people in science, for the public," says science communications expert Felicity Mellor of the United Kingdom's Imperial College London. "His (1988) book came at a time when he was still very active in science, despite being disabled, enjoying a very vigorous intellectual life. And his public profile appealed very much to people interested in the human side of his situation."

"He really is the closest thing we have in physics to a sage," says physicist Phillip Schewe, chief science writer at the American Institute of Physics, who once accompanied Hawking to hear two hours of sessions at a physics meeting a decade ago. "He is a scientist, he wanted to attend the sessions to hear what people were working on. But at the same time, when he gave his talk, you could see people paying rapt attention to him."

In physics, Hawking's biggest contribution has come in explaining black holes, where he showed these collapsed stars, with gravity so strong that even light cannot escape from them, do radiate heat. "Hawking radiation" explained why microscopic black holes formed in high speed cosmic ray collisions aren't much of a worry, they radiate their heat away quickly and dissolve. Something similar may have happened to black holes formed in the early pressure cooker of the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Supermassive black holes, such as Saggitarius A*, located at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, radiate their heat very slowly, meaning such objects will linger in the cosmos long after the light from the smallest star has burned out, trillions of years from now.

Working with Penrose, Hawking showed the early mathematics of the Big Bang resemble those of black holes, opening a window for physicists to tie together Einstein's theory of gravity with the particle physics explaining electromagnetic and nuclear forces, a project still hotly pursued today.

"He did do important work. Not up there with the big names of the early part of the last century, but important," says Mellor, who is also a physicist. "Not many scientists have his sort of public profile. I certainly think he stands for science in the public imagination."

Whether such renown is a good thing or a bad thing for science depends on how the scientist deals with fame, Mellor adds. Scientist lose control of their image when they become icons, after all. "For Stephen Hawking, I think this has been a double-edged thing. He has huge fame and followers, and just to have a scientist in that position is a good thing for science," she says. But given his profession of theoretical physics, the most removed from everyday reality of occupations, his connection to the revered Newton's chair and his disability limiting his speech, "Hawking has helped reinforce the image of scientists as distanced from ordinary human beings," Mellor says.

Hawking's famously sharp wit, not to mention the tabloid headlines, have worked against a remote image. "We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special," he once said in a typically pungent observation mixing the mundane and the marvelous.

For the public, such observations may be Hawking's real legacy, Mellor says. His book made it acceptable for young scientists to publish popular explanations of their work to the public, sparking a popular science boom. Despite planning to step down from his post this year, Hawking had said he planned to continue working on problems in his profession, of which he once said that he "was fortunate that I chose theoretical physics, because that is all in the mind."

Here's hoping for a speedy recovery.