The Hawking phenomenon
Abstract
Public Undersland. Sci. 1 231-234. Prinred in the UK ESSAY REVIEW The Hawking phenomenon Michael Rodgers assesses the impact of Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time on popular sciencepublishing In his Fifty Years With Science,' J. G. Crowther describes an evening discourse on 'Stars and Atoms' delivered by Eddington to a packed audience at the 1926 annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford. Eddington subsequently combined the talk with some other lectures and published them in 1927 as his Stars and Atoms, the first of the famous Eddington and Jeans bestsellen. Crowther goes on to recount a meeting he had with Rutherford, some years later, when Rutherford told him: 'Jeans said to me "that fellow Eddington's written a book which has sold 50 OOO copies. I will write one that will sell 100 ooo", and by God he did'. Lectures on fundamental physics and cosmology at annual meetings of the British Association have continued to attract packed audiences (I have sat in many of them over the past twenty years or so) and serious popular physics books have continued to sell, though rarely in six-figure quantities. Book publishers with popular science