Hawking Hawking, Charles Seife
Hawking Hawking, Charles Seife
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Hawking Hawking
The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity

Author: Charles Seife

Narrator: Tom Perkins

Unabridged: 16 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/10/2021


Synopsis

When Stephen Hawking died, he was widely recognized as the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person.

He was neither.

In Hawking Hawking, science journalist Charles Seife explores how Stephen Hawking came to be thought of as humanity's greatest genius. Hawking spent his career grappling with deep questions in physics, but his renown didn't rest on his science. He was a master of self-promotion, hosting parties for time travelers, declaring victory over problems he had not solved, and wooing billionaires. Confined to a wheelchair and physically dependent on a cadre of devotees, Hawking still managed to captivate the people around him-and use them for his own purposes.

A brilliant exposé and powerful biography, Hawking Hawking uncovers the authentic Hawking buried underneath the fake. It is the story of a man whose brilliance in physics was matched by his genius for building his own myth.

About Charles Seife

Charles Seife is the author of several books, including Proofiness and Virtual Unreality. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including the New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, Science, Scientific American, and the Economist. He is a professor of journalism at New York University and lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kevin on December 07, 2022

Judging by the title, I half expected this to be some sort of tabloid takedown of Hawking’s legitimacy as a relevant and important cosmologist. I was wrong. If anything, Hawking Hawking is a biographical celebration of one of the most recognizable scientists of the 20th Century. “…the vast majority......more

Goodreads review by Livresque on March 25, 2021

First of all , Thank you ! Netgally , for providing this book. Let me start with this, Steven Hawking is a scientific maverick in physics World. Mind like his comes in to existence once in a century. Being a Physics graduate, I was gravitated towards him from my early days. After reading his Pop-Sci......more

Goodreads review by Bonnye Reed on April 06, 2021

I received a free electronic ARC of this biography from Netgalley, Charles Seife, and Perseus Books - Basic Books. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read Hawking Hawking of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. This book is filled with myria......more

Goodreads review by Federico on December 30, 2024

A one-dimensional collection of tabloid-level reporting about Stephen Hawking with a single thing in common: being negative. The author's theory is that Hawking was no genius, using the unattainable standard set by Einstein to measure against - a standard no one else in physics and perhaps all of sc......more