including Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000), which won the 2000 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction; Alpha & Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe (2003); Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, From Our Brains to Black Holes (2005); Sun in a Bottle: The Strange History of Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking (2008), which won the 2009 Davis Prize from the History of Science Society; Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception (2010); and Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You So, How Do You Know It's True? (2014).
Seife applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity, and reported the following:
Hawking Hawking's reversed chronology starts at Stephen Hawking's death in 2018 and wends its way back to his birth in 1942; page 99 comes right at the end of the chapter entitled "Concessions" that covers the years 2004-2007. The title of the chapter has a double meaning: Hawking concedes an important wager at the center of his life's work, and at the same time, refers to Hawking's selling himself. Page 99 finishes a description of how he was used by -- and used -- billionaires he struck up relationships with: oligarch Yuri Milner, fracking innovator George Mitchell, entrepreneur Richard Branson, and others. The chapter then ends:Visit Charles Seife's website.In the last decade of his life, Hawking did little science of note — certainly none considered to be of high import—and very little science communication. He was neither scientist nor communicator as much as he was a brand.On one level, the page 99 test gives a decent sense of the book's narrative arc because it lands on a signpost I left for the reader to mark the trail ahead before entering into the next big section about Hawking's rise to celebrity and the collapse of his first marriage. But the test doesn't do a great job at giving a feeling for the prose of the book. Hawking Hawking relies heavily on interviews and archival research to draw an intimate portrait of the physicist. By the luck of the draw, page 99 had none of that on display. In other words, page 99 provides a good map of the forest, but it doesn't display any the beautiful detail of the trees.
The authentic Hawking, the man who had devoted his life to physics, and who had a passion to be understood not just by his peers but also by the public, is barely visible behind the image, the commercial product that he had become. It’s a vexing, almost paradoxical situation: Hawking’s celebrity had almost completely obscured the very elements of Hawking that had made him a celebrity in the first place.
Page 99 also marks a turning point in the book. Not only is it the last page in a chapter, that chapter happens to mark the end of the first of three large sections of the book. Before page 99, I discuss the celebrity Hawking that everyone is already familiar with: the most famous scientist in the world, "world's smartest man" in his wheelchair and with his robotic voice. After page 99, the narrative turns to showing Hawking evolve from an important but obscure physicist to the mega-celebrity.
And by its nature, the page-99 test can't give any sense of the bizarre -- almost mesmerizing -- effect of running the chronology backwards. As you read through the narrative, you get the sense of a well-crafted image falling to pieces and revealing the raw material underneath -- an unbuilding of a person. That's an effect you can only get by getting into the flow of the book, rather than looking at a single page.
--Marshal Zeringue
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