Actor Jim Carrey met Hawking on a US talk show in 2003 and soon after visited his home in Cambridge, England, where he was mowed down by the professor’s wheelchair. Hawking was long ago paralysed by the usually fatal ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease).

The Theory of Everything – The Origin and Fate of the Universe
By Stephen W Hawking
Published by New Millennium Press, 2002
Reviewed by Paul Dorsey for The Nation

The book Stephen Hawking doesn’t want you to read! No, he hasn’t been caught in his underpants – but the mystery here is beyond his known existence.

Everything for dummies

A couple of things immediately jump out when you visit Stephen Hawking’s website (www.hawking.org.uk). One is that the famed physicist was at December’s British Comedy Awards to help honour the creator of television’s “The Simpsons”. (He “guest starred” in one episode too, if memory serves.) The other is that he officially disowns this book.
“Professor Hawking would like to make it clear that he has not endorsed this book,” the site says in “An Important Note”. “The text was written by him many years ago, but the material has already been published in ‘A Brief History of Time’. A complaint was made to the Federal Trade Commission in the US in the hope that they would prevent the publication.”
So, with apologies to Asia Books and other distributors, we point out that Hawking doesn’t want you to buy “The Theory of Everything”. You can buy “A Brief History” or his more recent “The Universe in a Nutshell”, but not the other one with his name on it, which seems to be making the rounds again three years after it first appeared under this title and nearly a decade after it was published as “The Cambridge Lectures: Life Works”.
Why it’s returning now like a rogue comet is anyone’s guess, but it probably has nothing to do with this year being designated the World Year of Physics to mark the centenary of Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity.
Still, all things being relative, “The Theory of Everything” is a pleasant little lecture series, in large print and in Hawking’s own voice (you can even get a discount on the Hawking lecture tapes if you’ve kept your receipt). Like science populariser Carl Sagan before him, Hawking is adept at simplifying complicated ideas and occasionally shows a wry humour. Laymen who don’t know their protons from their photons will feel quite comfortable.
But there are limits to simplification, and by the end of the lectures one gets the impression that Hawking knows his listeners’ ears are glazing over and is hurrying to wrap up quantum gravity and virtual particles in string theory before the snores become audible. The book at least allows one to re-read the difficult bits, but even this didn’t help me understand the following: If you look at a shadow cast by the sun, the rays of light on its edge are not approaching each other.
What does this mean? Perhaps other readers will simply decide he’s referring to parallel rays of sunlight and move on. I was left questioning my intelligence.
And it doesn’t help when something like this pops up: “There are something like 1,080 particles in the region of the universe that we can observe.” I hope I’m not showing abject ignorance when I surmise that perhaps the sentence should read “1080 particles” (10 followed by 80 zeroes) or something like that.
But the main problem, apart from the publisher’s purported larceny, is that the book is outdated. In the not-really-brief-at-all history of time, it’s been ages (30 years) since Hawking discovered that black holes weren’t black at all. When he gave these lectures, his claim that they glowed with emitted radiation (now called Hawking radiation) was still controversial.
Back then, the professor’s infant premise that black holes gradually shrink and then disappear in a final explosive outburst led to a fundamental difficulty, dubbed the information paradox: If black holes gorge themselves on everything in their vicinity, what about the law of physics that the “mechanical information” also consumed must be preserved?
Hawking even bet John Preskill of the California Institute of Technology that the swallowed information could never be recovered. Last year, Hawking lost that bet for himself by determining that the event horizon – the surface of the black hole – has quantum fluctuations that leak out the information. Details are only now emerging, showing that time stands still for neither cosmologists nor publishers.
Hawking apparently likes making bets that he can lose, lest all the effort he’s heaved into black holes turns out to be pointless. In another one, outlined in the book, Caltech’s Kip Thorne will get a year’s subscription to Penthouse if it turns out that Cygnus X-1 has no black hole. Hawking believes it does, and stands to win four years’ worth of the satirical magazine Private Eye.
The text offers further intellectual relief in the form of God’s surprisingly frequent appearances, though the Almighty always labours beneath a question mark. Charmingly, Hawking recalls the pope cautioning participants in a 1981 cosmology conference at the Vatican that “it was okay to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of creation and therefore the work of God”.
Citing his admiration for Galileo, persecuted for the “heresy” of a sun-centred solar system (he died exactly 300 years before Hawking was born), the professor chuckles that he was glad the Holy Father didn’t know the subject of his conference address a few hours earlier.

Right: Coupla geniuses.