Hawking's goal was to understand the mind of God. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis
A new book is a bit like a baby universe. The moment of conception is always obscure and its birth uncertain. Then it bursts into the public consciousness and either undergoes swift collapse or experiences a brief, hectic period of runaway inflation before settling down to steady expansion and a continuously cooling reception: either shining on library shelves or surviving as cold, dark matter on the remainder pile.
Cosmology books were once especially vulnerable to early failure. Before 1965 – with the discovery of echoes of the big bang in the form of cosmic background radiation – they contained about as much scientific authority as the Book of Genesis, and made their case with considerably less conviction. Even after the confirmation in 1965 that the universe must indeed have experienced a beginning, cosmology books tended to be short-lived.
There has been one notable exception. In 1988, a Cambridge physicist became a publishing phenomenon. He wrote a book that stayed in the Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. He became a household name, he appeared in The Simpsons and in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and he sold six million copies in hard covers of a book that comedians would claim was the greatest unread book of all time. A Brief History of Time went through several versions, and there are an estimated nine million copies in circulation altogether, but I have once again picked up the first edition: the one with a foreword by Carl Sagan. The author is given as a certain Stephen W. Hawking.
The W has long since disappeared from the title pages: there is only one Stephen Hawking. I tried to make sense of its phenomenal success at the close of 1988, and have returned to the theme two or three times since then. And the answer is: I still don't know. I can't explain why it sold millions long before it went into paperback, but then none of us really knows why this universe has been successful enough to spawn galaxies, supernovae, black holes and humans. It depends on the initial conditions, and so, I suppose, did the success of A Brief History of Time.
Let us leave aside the charismatic nature of the book's creator, and the compelling mix of sympathy, awe and respect connected with his enduring illness. First, he addressed the great universal question: why are we here? In 1988, most people who were prepared to read cosmology books already knew that the universe had experienced a beginning, and might very well come to an end. Thanks to the steady attrition of journalism, books, radio and television programmes, they had got the hang of a few assorted facts: that light could somehow condense into matter; that there was such a thing as antimatter; that space could expand, even if there was nothing it could expand into; that stars could collapse into black holes; that gravity was a very strange thing; that quantum mechanics was not only really weird, but also weirdly real; that there were some crazy things out there still to be discovered, like cosmic string and magnetic monopoles; and that there might be something puzzlingly special about the universe, since it had produced the conditions for intelligent life.
But it was difficult to reduce these things to one big story with a cracking title. Steven Weinberg did it in 1977 with his wonderful The First Three Minutes. Eleven years later, Hawking came along with A Brief History of Time. It is true that he came along in a motorised wheelchair, driven by the pressure of one finger, and spoke through a voice synthesiser, but if he had written a third-rate book with a second-rate title, nobody would have paid much attention.
In fact he wrote a sufficiently good book with an excellent title and he came along at exactly the right time, because by the close of the 1980s, the realisation was dawning on hundreds of millions of us that science had a great story to tell. Scientists had begun the exploration of the nine planets, had identified and manipulated DNA, eliminated smallpox and begun the campaign to eradicate polio, turned vast corporate computers into household toys, explained the mechanisms that created the continents, and introduced a timeline for creation.
And then along came a man in a wheelchair with a great title, a gift for laconic statements, a decent prose style and a reputation for knowing a great deal about black holes – rather thrilling things that might or might not exist. This cocktail of friendly scholarship and classy narration would certainly have got the book off to a good start. Throw in a few, admirably sparing references to Hawking's physical constraints ("I started to think about black holes as I was getting into bed. My disability makes this a slow process, so I had plenty of time") and you have extra momentum.
But the thing that really lit the blue touchpaper, I now suspect, was all those references to God.
Thanks to the Dawkins Effect, atheism has seemingly become the norm in science. One forgets that, 21 years ago, Church of England was the default tick on the census form and that most people would have experienced some kind of religious education. Carl Sagan's introduction to the first edition identifies the conjuring trick the book so adroitly performs: "Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do."
There, that's my thesis. Profound theme, good narrative style, great title and accidentally perfect timing, plus a bit of divine help and of course a lot of media attention. Those are the initial conditions for a bestseller, certainly, but nine million copies? That's the real puzzle. Anyone got a better idea?
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