Hawking and the Mind of God

Stephen Hawking has achieved a unique position in contemporary culture, combining eminence in the rarefied world of theoretical physics with the popular fame usually reserved for film stars and rock musicians. Yet Hawking's technical work is so challenging, both in its conceptual scope and in its mathematical detail, that proper understanding of its significance lies beyond the grasp of all but a few specialists. How, then, did Hawking-the-scientist become Hawking-the-icon? Hawking's theories often take him into intellectual territory that has traditionally been the province of religion rather than science. He acknowledges this explicitly in the closing sentence of his bestseller, 'A Brief History of Time', where he says that his ultimate aim is to 'know the Mind of God'. 'Hawking and the Mind of God' examines the pseudo-religious connotations of some of the key themes of Hawking's scientific work, and how these shed light not only on the Hawking cult itself, but also on the wider issue of how scientists represent themselves in the media.