George's Secret Key to the Universe

Review also includes:

George’s Cosmic Treasure Hunt, 978-0552559614

The famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, author of A Brief History of Time, is a Professor at Cambridge, severely disabled by motor neurone disease. Lucy, a published novelist, is his daughter. Christophe Galfard, a former research student of Stephen’s, ‘has collaborated on the scientific storyline, details and images’. Treasure Hunt includes eight essays by Stephen and five other prominent physicists and astronomers, comprising ‘The User’s Guide to the Universe’. In addition, both books include factual texts, from half a page to four pages long, explaining ideas from astronomy or physics, or giving descriptions of planets, which are met in the story. A chapter of Secret Key entitled ‘What you need to know about black holes’ is also a factual text. In addition there are 32 pages of photographs of astronomical and space travel relevance in each book.

The principal characters in these two books are the same; a third book is promised for 2010. There is a closely associated website, www.lucyandstephenhawking.com, which links immediately to www.georgessecretkey.com. Those accessing the website are expected to take an Oath promising their good use of science – almost a brief adaptation of the Hippocratic Oath. The text of the Oath also appears in the story told in each of the books.

George is the son of ultra-eco anti-techno parents who won’t let him have a computer. Annie, the daughter of scientist Eric, has moved in next door with her father. Eric has a supercomputer, Cosmos, the most powerful computer in the world. George takes the Oath, and Cosmos opens doors and windows on the Universe for George to see.

The underlying motivation for the adults is a dialectic between Eric, who wants to find another habitable planet, and George’s parents, who want to preserve the habitability of the Earth. In Secret Key, Eric, misguided by Dr Reeper, George’s unpleasant teacher, and formerly a collaborator of Eric’s, goes on a planet-hunting space-voyage via Cosmos’s windows, but is trapped in a black hole. Cosmos, instructed by George, who has read a chapter about black holes written by Eric, speeds up the evaporation of the black hole by emission of Hawking radiation, and Eric is retrieved. George wins a computer by giving a prize-winning talk, My Secret Key to the Universe, at school, and his parents allow him to keep it.

In Treasure Hunt, George and Annie, following false clues planted by Dr Reeper about the prospective destruction of the Earth, pass through a series of Cosmos-opened doors and are rescued from a remote location by Eric, who is finally reconciled with Dr Reeper.

The identity of the old man with a beard who taught Eric and Reeper and designed the original Cosmos, is not revealed. Perhaps in the next book…?