21.04.2004

Truer than fact

BBC2, Tuesday April 13 Hawking

If I mentioned Alice in Wonderland, which characters would spring to your mind? The chronically anxious white rabbit, the alienated petty bourgeois suffering an imposed sense of ‘efficiency’ so unremitting he had forgotten the point of it? Or the Mad Hatter, retired from the world into a more cheerful, psychedelic, acid-induced version? My own imagination brings up Humpty Dumpty, hiding in thought separated from its mother reality, so that when he uses a word, the word means what he means it to mean. He later went on to become the chief theorist of the Workers Revolutionary Party, I hear, though he had a nasty fall in the early 80s (and the pieces went everywhere).

One thing I would put money on, though: you are not, at this moment, thinking of Alice herself. Of all the surreal characters in the book, it is ironic that she should be the least real. Her ordinariness is so complete that it leaves no impression. She is barely human: particularly next to the all-too-human grotesques she meets. She is a device, a gimmick, a lens through whom we observe Carroll’s fantasia. All that we ask of a lens is that it should be true and clear. We do not want to see it.

And so Carroll contrived his leading lady to be invisible. It was the right decision artistically: she would only have got in the way. An interesting Alice would have distorted the view of Wonderland through her own psyche, leaving us an equation with two unknowns. She did not matter: the world she moved through did. Similar is the watery Oliver in Oliver Twist, the plodding Winston Smith in 1984, and even the relentlessly terrestrial Arthur Dent in the Hitch hiker’s guide to the galaxy: though his homeliness is so complete, he at least gets a few laughs as he traverses the universe looking for cups of tea.

Reality, though, is less convenient. The relationship between the characters and the story is dialectical: they are both components which not only constantly affect each other, but are simultaneously interacting with external characters and forces. The neutral point of view is a fiction, suitable for fiction. It has no part in history.

This poses a problem for the writer of a dramatised life-story, which attempts to combine fiction and history, and in which Alice and the wonderland she moves through are both real and both fascinating. It was with interest, therefore, that I sat down to watch Hawking: advertised as “the story of professor Stephen Hawking’s early years told for the first time in a major drama for BBC2”.

Hawking is a cosmologist, who was boosted from a high reputation within academia to mass, popular, Beckham-like celebrity by the publication of his book A brief history of time in 1988. This book sold nine million copies and has been translated into 30 languages, making it the most popular book about science ever written.

Its reputation is controversial. Some fellow scientists complain that it presents theories as fact (though this assumes a fixed distinction between theory and ‘fact’ which Hawking admirably undermines in the book’s introduction). They have also complained that the book’s popularity has led to Hawking being overrated. He is not, they say, in the same league as Einstein or Schrödinger: they originated; he merely manipulated their ideas.

Non-scientist critics have pointed out that the number of copies of Hawking’s Brief history sold bears no relation to the number actually read. The book does not, they claim, actually succeed in conveying the ideas Hawking worked with: it has thrown off all but the most determined readers well before the end, and left most of the determined remainder confused.

I am not qualified to comment on the quality of the underlying scientific theory in the book, nor on its level of general acceptance in the scientific community: as a lay reader I can only record that I read it with fascination and at one, rather long, sitting. He undoubtedly cuts corners and glosses over certain arguments (how could he not?), but in the main I found the criticisms overblown. He succeeds not only in communicating the nature of the various scientific controversies: he sets them into a context of the struggle of ideas amongst the scientists, and even (to some extent) the social and above all religious forces which sway scientific beliefs.

The science itself is fascinating. Take black holes. These are collapsed stars: squashed into an incredibly dense blob which exerts such a gravitational pull that not even light can escape them: hence ‘black’. Nothing comes out, and everything which goes in stays. They are the pockets in a (somewhat warped) snooker table universe.

Hawking was the first scientist to suggest that they actually emitted radiation: an idea so counter-intuitive it was scoffed at - and indeed one he hesitated over for a long time before publishing. How could they emit anything? His reasoning was interesting.

His first point is that only particles which get too close to a black hole are lost into it. That ‘too close’ represents a distance from its centre. Projecting in all directions, it defines a sphere. Anything entering the sphere does not emerge.

His second is that quantum theory predicts a certain basic level of uncertainty about the existence and behaviour of very small particles. Plain, empty space violates this uncertainty: it is too predictable. To fit the theory, pairs of particles and anti-particles must be randomly winking into existence, only to then destroy each other, all the time.

But if such pairs or particles are created near the sphere around the black hole, one may cross into it (and be lost), and the other remain outside and escape. As this is happening at every point around the sphere, particles escaping destruction by their corresponding anti-particles must be spinning out in all directions: effectively radiation generated by the presence of the black hole. This is now known as Hawking radiation.

If you find this thumbnail sketch of a thumbnail sketch intriguing, you will enjoy A brief history of time and may be prompted to further reading. Marxists will also be interested in the philosophical issues raised by the physics: such as the unmistakable role of dialectics in understanding quantum mechanics. However, many, many general readers, it cannot be doubted, had their curiosity about the universe heightened by this introduction. The universe itself is the ultimate wonderland.

The problem for the Hawking programme-makers, though, was that their hero’s story is also fascinating in itself. Born in 1942, he was enjoying a relatively normal, if clearly gifted, youth until he went skating with his family one day, fell and simply found he could not rise. He was diagnosed as suffering from motor neurone disease: a condition in which the brain gradually loses its ability to communicate instructions to the muscles of the body, while leaving consciousness unimpaired. Though he later explained that the diagnosis was never given to him directly, doctors expected him to live not more than another two years. For a young man about to begin a PhD and expected to be brilliant, this was the greatest possible blow.

The disease gradually reduced Hawking’s ease of physical movement, and eventually his speech. Both its effects and his foreknowledge of its inevitable progress add a powerful element to the story of his life. Though the programme ended well before this point, he finished A brief history using a hand-held mouse responding to the motion in one finger to select words from a computer screen. Alice, in this wonderland, had problems of her own.

How would a dramatisation of his life deal with this? Would it be an American-style feel-good movie, where an intrepid hero overcomes his problems through sheer pluck and well chosen motivational backing music, with bits of cod-science thrown in to emphasise the scale and romance of his achievement? Or would highly contrived dialogue give impossibly convenient explanations of the ideas while the man having them was quietly and simply progressed from stoop to stick to wheelchair?

In the event, a genuine and not entirely unsuccessful attempt was made to present a living reality with these aspects woven into one whole. Woven, that is, but not synthesised. Scenes flicked back and forth quickly between Hawking struggling with the limits imposed on his body, and struggling with the complexity of the ideas being formed by his mind. Like a weave, the alternative threads formed a fabric, but were still separately discernible. The question of the relationship between his life and his ideas was not directly addressed.

The programme did better, though, in portraying the realities of academic life, and their relationship to society. When Hawking first meets Fred Hoyle, the previous leader in the field, Hoyle is quick to explain the realities. “For research, you need brains, cash and balls. Brains should be enough, but in reality you need cash, and the balls to get it.” No ‘purity of science’ myth here: Hoyle is portrayed as a pugnacious and seasoned player, as well as a scientist. Originator of the steady state theory, in which the universe had no ‘beginning’, he criticises the theory he himself originally and slightingly dubbed the ‘big bang’. His contempt for the theory, in this dramatisation at least, is largely due to the pope’s support for it - because it mirrors the christian creation myth. “Religion,” Hoyle insists, “is the enemy of science.”

Hoyle’s power is well communicated. He is an established authority. He is a fellow of the Royal Society. An assistant reading one of Hoyle’s papers before it is presented to that society comments: “His work really should be reviewed first by a committee, but there isn’t time.” The norms of peer review are waived in view of his status. The physically shaky Hawking, who challenges his theory publicly at this presentation, is quickly condemned for rocking the boat.

The most famous social use to which modern physics has been put - nuclear weaponry - is curiously handled. It is only directly referred to once: a rather bumptious fellow student denigrates the importance of cosmology: the important science, he says, is that which went into the bomb. Hawking is affronted. Blaming Einstein for the atomic bomb, his fictional counterpart says, is like blaming Newton for air crashes because Newton discovered gravity. Actually, this argument does not work even in its own terms, as gravity operates whether we have discovered it or not: the bomb was the product of human labour. More to the point, though, it ignores Einstein’s famous, and later repented, role in urging the American government to do research into nuclear weapons. Did the writer think this through so poorly himself, or intend his character to speak so?

The only other reference to this issue is made by having the on-screen Hawking wear a CND badge almost continuously during the years covered by the story. His remark about Einstein aside, he makes no comment about the politics behind this gesture, or any other social views.

The worst problem with the dramatisation, though, is its plausibility. If it were all the information you had about Hawking, its imaginative coherence would provide a seductively certain view of him. This is a problem it shares with all work of this genre.

Only once have I seen a dramatisation - in fact, two dramatisations - of the life of a man I actually knew something about. I have always been fascinated by the life and work of CS Lewis: best known perhaps for his Narnia books for children, but the author of a far wider range of christian polemics, science fiction and literary criticism. I agree with almost nothing he says, and why he interests me is another subject, but suffice for now to say that I have read all his books and many about him.

The play Shadowlands, based on his marriage to Joy Gresham, was first filmed for television with Lewis being played by Joss Ackland. I realised, watching it, that much had been changed and simplified, but I was still impressed: Ackland’s performance rang true and the writers had not been careless with fact. I later saw a film by the same name, in which Anthony Hopkins played the writer, and endured two hours of gnawing frustration. Hopkins played a gentle English academic, and not the formidable, Belfast-born, often reactionary but always sharp, intellectual street fighter Lewis had clearly been … Well, it would be fruitless to explore that anger again now.

What motivated the anger, though, was the realisation that the internal coherence of the image presented, and its carefully constructed emotional appeal, would mislead viewers far more than any simple written collection of errors or lies. The power of a dramatisation is also its danger: it is crafted to do more than inform, and can therefore do worse than misinform. It aims to create an emotional and imaginative impression, and can therefore implant error below the level of conscious discrimination.

Without real knowledge, good coin is difficult to separate from bad: and in the case of the life of professor Stephen Hawking, I have no real knowledge. The best I can do, therefore, is warn that history and art are a potent mix, best handled with care.