James Gleick
The world’s first scientist-celebrity, Isaac Newton, was entombed in Westminster Abbey with high ceremony, alongside statesmen and royalty, under a monument ornately carved in white-and-gray marble, bearing a fulsome inscription in Latin: “Mortals rejoice that there has existed so great an ornament of the human race!” His fame had spread far across the European continent. In France the young Voltaire lionized him: “He is our Christopher Columbus. He has led us to a new world.” An outpouring of verse filled the popular gazettes (“Nature her self to him resigns the Field/From him her Secrets are no more conceal’d”). Medals bearing his likeness were struck in silver and bronze.
When Stephen Hawking died, in 2018, the abbey buried his ashes a few yards away from Newton’s grave. Besides family and luminaries, the interment ceremony drew so many mourners that a thousand were chosen by lottery and 26,000 turned away. “His name will live in the annals of science,” said Martin Rees, Britain’s astronomer royal. “Nobody else since Einstein has done more to deepen our understanding of space and time.” Hawking’s own words—generated by a speech synthesizer he used after a degenerative disorder took away his ability to speak—echoed from loudspeakers placed around the church: “I am very aware of the preciousness of time. Seize the moment. Act now. I have spent my life travelling across the universe inside my mind.” Far away in Spain, a radio telescope beamed the same words into the heavens. Benedict Cumberbatch, who had portrayed Hawking in a television movie, read from the Wisdom of Solomon: “For it is he who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists.” The abbey choir sang. Now the gift shop sells a postcard of his gravestone.
Hawking was no Newton. He said so himself. At a White House event in 1998, First Lady Hillary Clinton read a question from the Internet: “How does it feel to be compared to Einstein and Newton?” He replied, “I think to compare me to Newton and Einstein is media hype.” Then again, as Charles Seife demonstrates in Hawking Hawking, he “worked very hard to cultivate” these comparisons. He played for the White House audience a clip of his cameo appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which he banters with holographic representations of Newton and Einstein over a game of poker. Einstein calls his bet: “All the quantum fluctuations in the universe will not change the cards in your hand.” But Hawking is the winner in this game, as Seife recounts: “‘Wrong again, Albert,’ Hawking gloats, a huge grin on his face, as a motorized arm reveals his hand. Four of a kind.”
Hawking occupied Newton’s professorship at the University of Cambridge, the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, and he often said he felt “a strong sense of identity” with Galileo, having been born exactly three hundred years after Galileo’s death. The jacket copy on his popular books claimed that he was “regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein,” which stretched the truth.
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