‘The physics you buy in supermarkets’: writing science for the general public : the case of Stephen Hawkings

Following the fall of the great ideologies that informed the 19th and 20th century, science took their place in people’s imagery. In the same period, science and its corollary practical application – technology – underwent unprecedented developments, culminating in the rapid and ground-breaking advances of the past half century, with the notable prominence of the internet and all web-related technology. The general public can enjoy all the applied benefits of technology but not the research behind or beyond it: science has become a new religion, scientists a new caste. What happens when one of the caste opens up to the public? Between 1988 and 2010, the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking wrote five popular science books aimed at bringing physics closer to a wider audience than the mere academia. The operation proved very successful – with his best-seller alone (A brief history of time, 1988) reported to have sold over 10 million copies (Paris 2007) – and made him into an acclaimed popular author. This study will consider Hawking’s books especially written for popularizing purposes, presenting reflections on the relationship between ESP, popularization and translation, and focusing in particular on Hawking’s first such work, A Brief History of Time, which was made into an even more popular adaptation titled A Briefer History of Time (2005) and translated, in both its versions, into Italian. The aim of the paper will be to detail how the subject has been adapted and transferred from a high into a popular (writing) and an even more popular (re-writing) level, and then into another language (translation), what relationship there is between these passages, and how Hawking’s book has affected the recent trend towards science popularization. This will be done by comparing the works against the general features of English for Scientific/Academic Purposes, to single out their variation from – or conformity to – the established norms of this specialized language, providing a textual analysis and highlighting relevant lexical and syntactic phenomena. An interpretation of such phenomena will be proposed according to Critical Discourse Analysis methodology, i.e. considering language in light of the many social, cultural and economic variables informing this type of communication.