Stephen Hawking's Brief History of a Best Seller

Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking describes the rocky origins of his popular science book

• STEPHEN HAWKING - The Wall Street Journal

I first had the idea of writing a popular book about the universe in 1982. My intention was partly to earn money to pay my daughter's school fees. But the main reason was that I wanted to explain how far we had come in our understanding of the universe: how we might be near finding a complete theory that would describe the universe and everything in it.

 

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Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, around 1988. A literary agent told him a book about the universe could never become popular.

If I was going to spend the time and effort to write a book, I wanted it to have as many readers as possible. I contacted a literary agent and gave him a draft of the first chapter, explaining that I wanted it to be the sort of book that would sell in airport bookstores. He told me there was no chance of that. It might sell well to academics and students, but a book like that couldn't break into best-seller territory.

I gave the agent a first draft of the book in 1984. He sent it to several publishers, and I decided to take an offer from Bantam Books. Bantam's interest was probably due to one of their editors, Peter Guzzardi, who took his job very seriously and made me rewrite the book so that it would be understandable to nonscientists. Each time I sent him a rewritten chapter, he sent back a long list of objections and questions. 

At times I thought the process would never end. But he was right: It is a much better book as a result.

I was sure that nearly everyone is interested in how the universe operates, but most people cannot follow mathematical equations. I don't care much for equations myself. This is partly because it is difficult for me to write them down, but mainly because I don't have an intuitive feeling for equations. Instead, I think in pictorial terms, and my aim in the book was to describe these mental images in words, with the help of familiar analogies and a few diagrams.

Still, even if I avoided using mathematics, some of the ideas would be difficult to explain. This posed a problem: Should I try to explain them and risk people being confused, or should I gloss over the difficulties? Some unfamiliar concepts were not essential to the picture I wanted to draw, but others were. 

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