Stephen Hawking knew how to separate the man from the myth. The man was playfully self-deprecating, aware that being played by Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything made his younger self seem more handsome than he had ever been. The myth, or as Hawking puts it in the opening chapter of this book, “the stereotype of the disabled genius”, was that of a visionary, an oracle, something beyond human. Hawking was far too self-aware to ever believe it. “To my colleagues, I’m just another physicist,” he says.
That’s not actually true, of course. The mathematician Roger Penrose, who collaborated on some of Hawking’s greatest work, says Hawking was “extremely highly regarded” by his colleagues, largely because he made “many greatly impressive, sometimes revolutionary, contributions to the understanding of the physics and the geometry of the universe”.
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