E-mail a friendLucy Hawking
airdate October 25, 2007
Lucy Hawking has written for several publications, including New York magazine, the London Evening Standard and London's Daily Mail. She's also a novelist and has collaborated with her famous father, physicist Stephen Hawking, on George's Secret Key to the Universe—the first of a trilogy of children's books. Hawking read French and Russian at Oxford and has had two previous novels published. She's also an administrative staff member of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge.
Lucy Hawking
Tavis: Lucy Hawking is the author of two novels and writes frequently for newspapers in her home country of Great Britain, along with her father, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. She's out with a new book aimed at middle school kids called "George's Secret Key to the Universe." The book helps young adults understand the mysteries of science. Lucy, nice to have you on the program.
Lucy Hawking: Hello, it's nice to be here.
Tavis: Glad to have you here. So now that I'm an adult, you write a book that I should have had when I was in middle school. Matter of fact, I could probably still learn something from this right about now.
Hawking: There's no upper age limit on the book. It is for eight plus, but you could read it at any age - any age where you felt like you needed a bit more of an introduction to physics would be fine.
Tavis: I think a lot of folk feel that way. There's something, as I've discussed with many people before, about science and math that just kind of scares us, kind of frightens us. I take it you never felt that way, though.
Hawking: Well, I grew up with science all around me, so I didn't find it so scary. And one of the things about writing this book was to try and make science accessible and entertaining for kids and for adults.
Tavis: What's your sense, at least, of why so many kids are intimidated, for lack of a better word, by science?
Hawking: I think it's very hard to say. I know that in the United Kingdom, there's a problem that there just aren't enough science teachers. So maybe not enough kids are getting a basic grounding at school, so they're not getting that encouragement to go on and study science at a later stage.
But again, with our book, "George's Secret Key," we're hoping to just give you an idea about physics and a little bit about our planet, the Earth, and where it sits in the great cosmic scheme of the solar system and beyond. And that, again, to open people's minds and engage their curiosity.
Tavis: Okay, so tell me how you do that in the book, and make it fun and interesting for kids.
Hawking: Well, you follow the story. You follow the story of a little boy called George, and it's all about his adventures. And he meets a scientist who has a supercomputer called Cosmos, and Cosmos is so powerful and so clever he can draw a doorway through which you can walk to any part of the known universe. And so the story follows George's adventures on the planet Earth and through the doorway, but all those adventures are based on real science.
So you learn a lot. While you're reading the story of George and there's a bad guy and there's all sorts of exciting cosmic events going on, you're actually learning quite a lot at the same time.
Tavis: The idea for something creative and fun like this comes from where?
Hawking: I had the idea, because I have a background in creative writing, and I said to my dad that I'd really like to work with him to write a book that would explain some of the work my dad's done to my son, who's 10 now, to my nephew, and also to all the kids who are coming up to my dad and saying things like "So Steven, what would it be like if I fell in a black hole?"
And all the kids were asking him these questions, and all their questions were well, what would it be like if I went for a walk on Jupiter? How near can I get to the Sun before I explode or get incinerated? And so this book is a reflection of those questions. It's what would it be like if I saw a star being born?
Tavis: So first of all, how is your father?
Hawking: He's very, very well, thank you.
Tavis: He's doing well? I want to ask you about him in just a second. But first, we know how wildly brilliant your father is, so your background is creative writing, your father's one of the brilliant physicists in the world, how did you find it working with your father in terms of breaking down these very deep concepts for middle school kids?
Hawking: Well, my father's actually spent a lot of his career explaining complicated subjects in simple language, and it's something he really, really loves doing. He's very passionate about it. He's very passionate about education and about telling people about things that maybe they think they don't understand. So it's kind of this book is a reflection of that talent and that passion that he has for getting involved.
And also he loves explaining things in quirky, entertaining, funny ways, and he was doing that years before he started his career in popular science writing. So it's something he's always been interested in.
Tavis: You have how many siblings? How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Hawking: I've got two brothers.
Tavis: Two brothers. Is science something that everybody in the family gets turned on by? Are you the one that -
Hawking: My older brother is a scientist. I'm not a scientist. When I was - as a child, I was like the family entertainer. I wanted to be a ballerina, and I'd make all my family gather in the sitting room and sit there and be my audience while I performed a ballet for them, and I'm really glad my parents didn't have a video camera. There's no record of any of those performances, thank goodness for that.
Tavis: What was it like, what has it been like, growing up as a child of Stephen Hawking?
Hawking: Well, when I was a child, my father wasn't famous. Not in the very kind of iconic, global sense that he is now. He was really well known among scientists, and quite a small, select bunch of scientists. But of course he was, even at that stage of my childhood, very disabled, and in the United Kingdom it was very unusual to see a disabled man out by himself, in an electric wheelchair, sort of as independent as my dad.
And that caused - a lot of people would stand and stare at him, and as a child, I felt very resentful of those people who would stare. I really disliked that. And now I always feel very glad when I see disabled people out and about, that they're given some dignity and some privacy, and they're allowed to get on with their lives.
Tavis: I suspect that many people watching right now who have relatives, fathers and mothers, for that matter, who have physical challenges, how as a child did you navigate those stares? How did you keep from becoming bitter, how did you respond to other kids when they would say things or ask things or make remarks? How did you deal with that?
Hawking: Other kids were very, very good. A lot of people ask me about that, but I never really had a problem with other kids. I found a lot of people were very kind and very compassionate to me and to my family when I was growing up. I think a lot of the challenges we faced were physical ones. At that stage, disabled access was still very, very bad.
And we'd arrive somewhere and suddenly there'd be steps and there would be no way of getting up them. And people are now a lot more encouraging to disabled people in general as they were then, but there's no doubt about it. It's very challenging and it takes a lot of hard work and a lot of energy and a lot of compassion on the part of everyone in the family.
Tavis: To your point now about compassion in the family, as a child, what primary lessons do you learn from being exposed to someone who is on the one hand extremely brilliant, but on the other hand physically challenged? As a child, what kind of life lessons do you take from that as a kid?
Hawking: As a kid, you definitely learn not to give up. You learn the value of persistence and perseverance, and that life can be hard, and that also the other thing you learn in that situation as a child is that life isn't fair, and that you can wish as much as you like for things to be different and say, “Oh, it's not fair because my dad can't walk” or, “It's not fair, I don't want my dad to be ill,” but that's life and you just have to get on with what you've been given and make the best of it.
Tavis: Might there be more in this series of work about George?
Hawking: We've started on George's adventures part II already.
Tavis: Already.
Hawking: Yes, we have. George gets to go home at the end of the first book and have a little bit of a rest, but not for long, because I'm sending him off on a whole new series of adventures.
Tavis: George is a fairly common name. How did we end up with George as the title of this one?
Hawking: George was the name of my grandfather, who died three years ago. And so it's a name I have a lot of affection for. It's also a name that travels very well. It's a name that people recognize around the (unintelligible).
Tavis: I was about to ask you that, because obviously - well, first of all, I mentioned that you live in the UK and one could hear it from your accent anyway. How does a book like this translate, how does it work for kids the world over? Not just in the UK.
Hawking: Well, I've just been in Australia and New Zealand, where there's been a very warm reception to George. They have some of the problems you touched on earlier about getting kids into science, getting kids enthusiastic about science. They have the same problems there, and so from that point of view, George is very welcome.
All over the world, wherever I've been in Europe, now here in the USA, Australia, and New Zealand, it seems to be that George seems to touch a common chord. It is a book about standing on our planet and appreciating our planet and saying how wonderful and amazing and fragile and beautiful our planet is, and then looking out at the solar system and realizing that there are some very different worlds and different environments out there.
So that's a common theme. And we start with a very global experience of looking up at the stars at night and thinking, well, what are they doing there? Why do they shine?
Tavis: I wonder whether or not - I think when I was a kid, I used to love to go - we had, I was very fortunate to go into a school system, go into a middle school, in fact, for junior high that had a planetarium in the school. So we literally could go into the planetarium at our school every day, and while I found the subject matter sometimes challenging, I used to love the constellations and the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper.
I used to love going to that - that was the only - I was never a good science student, but the part I love to George's story was going to the planetarium. I wonder, though, with the challenges, certainly in a country like ours, the challenges that so many kids face today right here on Earth, whether or not they have the capacity to be curious about what's happening out there somewhere. Just trying to navigate daily life in a country like the United States and the places where life can be difficult to navigate for kids every day.
Hawking: Yes, I do agree that life is difficult for children, and that they do face a lot of pressures. However, I think we can all look up and look up at the stars or wonder what's beyond us. On a global level, my father's often said that he believes we can't continue looking inwards at ourselves on an increasingly overcrowded planet, and that it is time to look outwards.
And again, part of the value of looking outwards, and considering the other planets that are around us in the cosmic family of our sun, that comprise our solar system, is to say, “Well, these planets are fascinating.” Mars is a very interesting planet, and Venus and Jupiter, but you would never want to call them home.
And there's a very, very strong message in that which relates to how we treat the amazing planet on which we live, and how we really should learn to treat it better. And that, I think, is something that every kid needs to know.
Tavis: Along with her father, Stephen Hawking, Lucy Hawking has written a new book. It's called "George's Secret Key to the Universe." And it's a pleasure to have you on, all of our best to you and your family, your father.
Hawking: Thank you.
Tavis: Nice to see you. That's our show for tonight.
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