Stephen Hawking's Children and Colleagues Discuss Physicist's Final Book, Legacy

Brief Answers to the Big Questions discussion panel — Colleagues and children of the late Stephen Hawking gathered Oct. 15, 2018 at London's Science Museum to discuss his final book, "Brief Answers to the Big Questions."

(Image credit: Jody Kingzett, courtesy of the Science Museum Group)

In his final book, released Oct. 16, Stephen Hawking tackles big questions about the universe, delving into physics, cosmology, the existence of God and the future direction of humanity.

During a panel discussion held Oct. 15 at the Science Museum in London, Hawking's children and colleagues talked about the new book, called "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" (Bantam), and Hawking's lasting impact after his death in March.

"This is almost a response to the response to 'A Brief History of Time,'" Lucy Hawking, the scientist's daughter, said during the panel. "For 30 years my father's been regularly asked questions on a number of existential or scientific or … social questions, and given these very clear responses." Hawking came up with the concept and started the book before his death, but his family and collaborators pulled together the final collection of his answers, according to the panelists.

"He says in the book, people want answers to the big questions, and it was really important to him that he answered all these questions in a way that was accessible, that was engaging, that was entertaining, and that people could relate to," Lucy Hawking said. "He was very keen on creating relevance for people with abstract concepts, and I think that's something this book does in an absolutely fantastic manner — I know people who've looked through the book and said, 'It feels like he's written this for me; I didn't expect that.'"

"It's a huge problem that Stephen gave to us," Andy Strominger, a physicist at Harvard University and co-author on the paper, said during the panel. "Stephen understood how to put the theory of black holes together with the theory of quantum mechanics, and from that derived the formula which is now on his headstone in Westminster Abbey, which essentially says how many gigabytes [of information are stored] in every black hole that we see up in the sky. And our job is to explain this formula, and it was hard to explain because we had been told that black holes were bald, featureless objects."

"We've lost perhaps our most powerful advocate for the value and importance of fundamental research in physics and science," Dowker said during the panel. "But as the physics community itself, internally, Stephen was a very powerful binding force in that community. At his large birthday conferences, many people would come, drawn by love and respect for Stephen, from an enormous range of different areas, all touched by his work."

"His scientific legacy is enormously broad — epically broad, I would say — so there would be cosmologists, people working on black holes, on gravitational waves, on quantum gravity, on string theory, on foundations of quantum mechanics, on condensed matter theory, on quantum information, and they would all be drawn together by Stephen," she added. "That force, to bring so many people working on so many different things together, is something that we will sadly miss."