Stephen Hawking and the Billionaires

Stephen Hawking and the Billionaires

 

Why did the physicist endorse the kooky ideas of the fabulously wealthy?

 

 

By Charles Seife

The Chronicle of Higher Education

May 11, 2021

 

 

By the 2000s, Stephen Hawking had been the living embodiment of scientific intellect for almost two decades. When he spoke on matters touching upon science, his words were uniquely persuasive. Nobody else could match his implicit authority about space, time, physics, or science in general. Such a strong voice attracts power. And money.

 

It doesn’t take a lot of money to make a theoretical physicist very happy; unlike experimentalists who need laboratories with large staffs and expensive equipment, theorists can make do with a blackboard and a graduate student or two. This makes them a cheap date for multimillionaires looking to draw scientific superstars into their orbit. And over the years, a number of wealthy people — mostly men — did just that, cultivating relationships with leading theorists for reasons of their own.

 

Some were smart but lacked formal education, and relished surrounding themselves with the smartest people on the planet. In the 1970s and ‘80s, Werner Erhard, who made his money with a controversial self-help program called EST, not only forged ties with leading scientists around the country but also hosted intimate conclaves where they gathered to discuss topics of interest. (Hawking attended one of them.) But at this point in Hawking’s life — the early 2000s — the new undereducated billionaire on the scene was Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Epstein would later become infamous for his pedophilia and sex trafficking. In March 2006, a few months before Epstein’s first indictment hit the headlines, he hosted a small conference in the Virgin Islands on gravity. Hawking was there — and apparently on Epstein’s nearby private island along with some of the other attendees of the conference: the theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, the Nobel laureate David Gross, and the Harvard theorist Lisa Randall. There’s also a picture of Hawking peering out the window of a submarine, which Epstein reportedly had modified to allow him to enter. Given the date, Hawking was most likely unaware of the allegations hanging over Epstein. There is no evidence that Hawking did anything improper or, unlike a number of other scientists, had any sort of contact with Epstein after the accusations against him became public. For Epstein didn’t adopt Hawking in the way some other billionaires had.

 

In 2002, Hawking met the oil baron George P. Mitchell and began a decadelong relationship that ended only when the magnate died in 2013. “He’s basically the guy who invented fracking,” says Hawking’s collaborator Andrew Strominger. “So he set up these two-, three-week retreats — he was a huge fan of Stephen — which were basically designed to create an environment where Stephen can work.” (Mitchell would go on to name an auditorium at Texas A&M — his alma mater — after Hawking.) “George P. Mitchell was a remarkable individual who combined vision with wisdom and persistence,” Hawking said after the billionaire died.

 

KARSTEN MORAN, The New York Times, Redux

Stephen Hawking in 2016 with the Russian-born billionaire Yuri Milner (right).

 

Another billionaire that Hawking singled out for praise was Yuri Milner, a Russian-born oligarch and internet tycoon who helped invest hundreds of millions of the Kremlin’s dollars into U.S. corporations. “Yuri Milner is something of a visionary,” Hawking enthused in 2016. “He sees that while there are many good causes and pressing problems, ultimately our chances of thriving as a species depend on tending and feeding the precious flame of knowledge.”

 

 

Milner met Hawking at a conference in Moscow in 1987 — Milner has a background in theoretical physics — and helped to tend and feed Hawking a quarter century later. In 2013, Milner awarded Hawking a “special” version of the billionaire’s new “Breakthrough Prize,” which came with a hefty $3-million purse. Milner also funded Hawking’s 2016 trip to Harvard to work with Andy Strominger on “soft hair” — an only somewhat novel theory as to what covered black holes that Hawking claimed as a major achievement.

 

The relationship between the billionaire and the physicist got closer over time. Hawking put his name to two of Milner’s hugely expensive and somewhat daft scientific projects — a search for alien radio transmissions, and an attempt to send ultra-tiny spacecraft to the nearest star — either of which would likely have gotten little attention without the imprimatur of his name.

 

Hawking “was very much conscious that if he wanted to keep in the public eye, he needed sponsorship; you know, he needed support,” says the theoretical physicist Marika Taylor, a former advisee of Hawking’s. And that support — along with Hawking’s public profile — was to a large degree dependent upon making headlines. “He was often asked to comment about topics where he should have said, ‘You know, actually I don’t want to comment about this; this is not something I have the expertise for,’” Taylor says. “He would admit this privately, but he said it in public because ... there may have been sponsorship involved or he may have been doing it because keeping him in the public eye helped the sponsorship.”

 

Though Milner’s projects were arguably a little kooky, they probably appealed to Hawking on some level. It didn’t take much for Hawking to swallow whatever discomfort he felt about straying from his expertise to put his voice behind them. “Many of these things were not things he wanted to talk about,” says Taylor. “But he felt he should.”

 

For example, Hawking’s support of the Milner spacecraft project was helped by the fact that Hawking was personally an advocate of spaceflight. He had argued on numerous occasions that the long-term survival of the species depends on our eventually being able to leave the planet. Of all of Hawking’s out-of-left-field stances, it was this one that led to the most benefit for Hawking. Including one of his most iconic moments, again, sponsored by the largesse of a titan of industry.

 

In October 2006, Hawking met the multimillionaire Peter Diamandis, a California businessman who himself had a great interest in space and space technologies. Six months earlier, Diamandis had signed a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to use the shuttle landing strip at Kennedy Space Center.

 

Diamandis’s new company, the Zero Gravity Corporation, needed the landing strip to perform zero-gravity flights with its Boeing 727. That is, the jetliner would take off and climb to 24,000 feet. And then, in a set of stomach-churning maneuvers, the plane would suddenly lurch up and zoom to 34,000 feet, then tip over and plummet back down again. The idea was to behave essentially like an object in freefall — if the pilot did the maneuvers just right, the passengers would feel no gravity at all for about 30 seconds at a time. For years, NASA used a similar plane to train NASA astronauts; it was dubbed the “Vomit Comet” for all-too-obvious reasons.

 

Diamandis offered Hawking a zero-gravity trip. “And he said, on the spot, ‘Absolutely, yes,’” Diamandis told an audience some time later. In April 2007, Hawking — with medical professionals on standby — took the plunge. Flashbulbs popped as two handlers helped him float into the air. For many of his fans, this was the only image that they had ever seen of the physicist out of his wheelchair. Emaciated, his hands curled at unnatural angles, he was a spectral figure — with a look of delight on his face.

 

The headlines across the world about Hawking’s zero-gravity flight certainly didn’t hurt the Zero Gravity Corporation’s prospects. And as it happened, at the time of Hawking’s flight, the corporation had bid on a contract to provide microgravity flight services for NASA — a contract that the corporation won in January 2008 — and that NASA later regretted. The corporation’s performance was often terrible — at times, its pilots failed to do the maneuvers properly more often than they did them right, meaning that the flights were all but worthless — yet all the public ever knew of the corporation, if they heard of it at all, was the Hawking flight. From the physicist’s point of view, a free zero-gravity flight for a little PR was a no-brainer. Upon landing, he gushed about the experience. “I could have gone on and on,” he said. And then he exclaimed: “Space, here I come!”

 

For Hawking had his eye on an even more ambitious target than a free zero-gravity jaunt: a free trip to outer space. He had already acquired the ticket.

 

In 2006, Richard Branson, billionaire owner of the Virgin corporation, was famously trying to set up a service to launch tourists out of the atmosphere and (hopefully) bring them back to Earth in one piece. At the time, the service, Virgin Galactic, was scheduled to begin in 2009. When Hawking appeared on a BBC radio show in November 2006, perhaps emboldened by his encounter with Diamandis, he made a not-so-subtle appeal. “My next goal is to go into space,” he told the host. “Maybe Richard Branson will help me out.”

 

Branson promptly promised to give Hawking a ride to outer space. “With delight I found myself with what I understand is the only free ticket for a Virgin Galactic space flight that Richard has ever handed out,” Hawking later said.

 

Branson’s engineers spent years working out kinks and overcoming delays while trying to get their spaceship into shape. Just when it looked like Virgin Galactic was on a clear path to commercial flights, in October 2014, a Virgin Galactic ship undergoing spaceflight testing broke up high over the Mojave Desert. One of the two test pilots was killed. The endeavor, already long delayed, was on the ropes.

 

After a year of investigations, redesigns, and retrenchments, Branson was nearly ready to unveil the redesigned spaceship. So, in December 2015, the Virgin team stopped by Cambridge University for an inspirational chat with the professor. Hawking fondly recalled an appearance he had made on BBC, expressing his desire to go into outer space. The host “asked me whether I was worried by the prospect of death. I replied that as my death, according to the medical profession, has been predicted many decades earlier, it did not overly concern me, but that there were still a few things left on my bucket list. Near the top of that list was the desire to experience space for myself,” he said.

 

When Branson unveiled the new prototype spaceship in February 2016, Hawking was unable to travel to the event, but he regaled the crowd with a recorded message: “We are entering a new space age, and I hope this will help to create a new unity,” he declared, naming the new vessel. VSS Unity, gleaming, sported a painted banner on its side bearing a gigantic image of Hawking’s eye. The physicist himself never got to ride, but that rocket will always bear his name.

 

This article is excerpted from Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity (Basic Books).

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.

 

Charles Seife is a professor of journalism at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

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