Stephen Hawking memoir offers lots of science, little insight

It's an astonishing image on the cover of Stephen Hawking's new book, “My Brief History.”

The world-famous cosmologist and physicist strikes a defiant Napoleonic pose: chin up, one hand at his breast and his other arm thrust aloft, clutching a white handkerchief.

But most striking is that he is standing up.

The photograph was taken during his Oxford student days, before amyotrophic lateral sclerosis confined him to a wheelchair and, later, his trademark computer voice-synthesizer that he operates with his check.

Not that ALS has kept him from his groundbreaking studies into black holes, quantum gravity and other scientific explorations, as he details in this slender memoir. Nor has it eliminated his sly humor.

In referring to his parents, he notes they lived among scientific and academic people. “In another country they would have been called intellectuals, but the English have never admitted to having any intellectuals.”

He recalls that as a child, “I was always very interested in how things operated, and I used to take them apart to see how they worked, but I was not so good at putting them back together again.”

He mentions that when he was 12, a friend bet him a bag of candy that he “would never amount to anything. I don't know if this bet was ever settled, and if so, which way it was decided.”

It's a complex joke: He's smarter than just about all of us but he wants to be seen as sort of a regular Joe, too. At least, as “regular” as someone who's written a handful of acclaimed books, won a raft of science awards and turned up on TV's “The Big Bang Theory.”

“My Brief History” tells us a bit about his eccentric parents, his schooling and his marriages as well as his childhood love of trains. Whether wooden, electric or clock-driven, his aim “was always to build working models that I could control.”

It's easy to see the progression from this youthful devotion for assembling trains to his adult conviction that “if you understand how the universe operates, you control it, in a way.”

But the book offers spare forward momentum in its narrative: This happened, then this, then this.

Hawking shares little as to how he feels about these things. He talks about his illness, about how he began needing a wheelchair and help getting out of bed. But he doesn't ascribe much feeling to these details.

Indeed, he doesn't reflect much at all on one his most amazing feats - that 50 years after his diagnosis with ALS, he's still alive. Lou Gehrig, for whom the disease is most associated, died at 37.

Sadly, about a third of the way into “My Brief History,” he starts dropping in heavy chunks of information about quantum electrodynamics, steady-state universe and gravitational waves.

Maybe, by this stage of his life, his work is everything. Toward the end, he rushes through highlights of his travels and adventures.

When he concludes with, “I'm happy if I have added something to our understanding of the universe,” it's a rare acknowledgment of emotion.

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