'An Unfettered Mind': Hawking bio weaves extraordinary life, work

STEPHEN HAWKING: An Unfettered Mind. By Kitty Ferguson. Palgrave Macmillan. 320 pages. $27.

Stephen Hawking is, in many ways, the Albert Einstein of our time, a brilliant theoretical physicist whose celebrity often eclipses his great achievements and those of others in the same field.

It was Walter Isaacson's excellent book on Einstein a few years back that set the bar for biographies of renowned scientists, integrating a well-researched and well-written account of the subject's life with a thorough layperson's explanation of the relevant science.

Kitty Ferguson, an accomplished science writer who divides her time between Bluffton, S.C., and Cambridge, England, has attempted to replicate that in her new book, "Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind."

Ferguson's book does not quite reach that same bar as the Einstein biography, especially stylistically. Yet she has done a reasonable job.

She interweaves the story of Hawking's life with the story of the cosmological work that has engaged him for so long.

She presents quite clearly the concepts and work done in the new frontiers of research from the time Hawking began his work in the mid-1960s until now.

It takes up more than half the text of the book and is an effective overview, even if it has been told elsewhere, better and in greater detail.

Hawking presents a challenging subject for a biographical portrait. He is a very private person who purportedly shared little of his inner emotional life, even with his family.

His disability (he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that has relegated him to a wheelchair since 1970, and to communicating via a computer since 1984) presents greater challenges since his method of communication is so arduous.

Also, perhaps the author's friendship with Hawking and respect for his privacy prevents her from digging deeper.

Still, one senses that the man has immense strength of character -- and more than a little stubbornness, according to his daughter -- to do the work he has done for so long, while also being an advocate for the disabled as his own condition continually degenerates.

He has done so with determination, spirit and an impish sense of humor.

Hawking's goal, expressed many times in different ways, essentially remains, "A complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is, and why it exists at all."

It's an ambitious goal and one that he will most likely not reach, but Hawking is part of a continuum of theoretical physicists who attempt to fully describe the universe in which we exist.

History will ultimately judge his work and his place in the pantheon of great scientists.

In a 2010 documentary "Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking," he introduces himself, "Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking: physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move, and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind, I am free."

It is that remarkable, unfettered mind, and that indomitable spirit, that we wish to know better.