Stephen Hawking, celebrity scientist Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity Charles Seife Basic Books, 2021. 400 pp

A new biography considers the cosmologist's reputation while placing his work in context For decades, cosmologist Stephen Hawking was caught in a contradiction. In popular culture, he was portrayed as a pure mind roaming the cosmos to uncover fundamental truths of the Universe, the modern heir to Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. In the physics community, he was respected as a productive theorist who made seminal contributions to black hole research, but many scientists considered his popular reputation to be ludicrously overblown. Veteran science writer Charles Seife seeks to resolve this contradiction in Hawking Hawking , the best biography yet published of the most famous scientist of recent decades.