Art News

Science Museum in London explores human side of researcher Stephen Hawking

NEW YORK, NY.- The college goofball; the excitable young researcher; the family man. It’s a side of Stephen Hawking relatively few people get to see. A new exhibition opening Friday at London’s Science Museum hopes to show the human side of the celebrity scientist, drawing on artifacts from Hawking’s study, letters from his archives, and pictures from his family collection to paint a more intimate portrait of the world’s best-known living theoretical physicist. “There’s quite a stereotyped image that we have of Hawking in a wheelchair in front of a field of stars, saying something profound about the universe,” Alison Boyle, the museum’s curator of astronomy, said Thursday before the exhibit’s launch. “There’s much more to him than that.” Hawking, 70, is renowned for his pioneering work on black holes and his best-selling