Theory and every thing: acquiring the office of Professor Stephen Hawking as a resource for history and museology

How do the curators of science and technology collections represent the daily realities of doing science? Through the acquisition of Professor Stephen Hawking’s office by the Science Museum, this paper will explore what is involved in making major acquisitions for national collections. How do curators consider what to preserve from the eclectic range of items found in the working spaces of scientists? What do the personal artefacts of a scientist’s life represent, and what do acts of curatorial choices say about the narratives that are foregrounded – and those that are not – in positioning that life historically? And how do those choices illuminate the considerations involved in the way science and technology is represented in our national collections? By going beyond the glass case, we consider what it takes to bring an object into a collection: the intellectual considerations of how its stories are preserved for a nation and the practical considerations required so that items can even be considered for future display. The paper illuminates the formal and informal networks around scientists’ collections, and the processes and judgements that science and technology curators make every day when choosing what could be important for defining our history. Using the Stephen Hawking office as a case study the article explores the representation of scientific practice in museum collections, the relationship of some collections with celebrity and disability, and some of the challenges posed by science and technology acquisitions compared to other types of museum object. The paper explores how knowledge is generated in museum collections, through the act of acquiring a new collection. It asks fundamental questions, which are essential to the fields of museology and science and technology studies, about the contribution to knowledge made by personal scientific objects. It goes beyond the study of collections as artefacts of display in exhibitions and galleries, providing a detailed analysis of a routine but often-neglected aspect of behind-the-scenes museum work: the acquisition of a collection. Arguing that a large and complex collection is a vital tool for understanding the complexity of science, the paper uses the ‘museum as method’ (Thomas, 2016) which prioritises simple curatorial questions and the use of the objects in exploration; this enables scholars and curators to respond to material evidence of scientific knowledge, and identify narratives that are prioritised, and others that are obscured, in the historic record. In doing so, it suggests that curators are uniquely placed to provide insights into the roles of human and non-human actors in the construction of scientific knowledge, demonstrating how the Hawking collection allows us to explore the nature of scientific practice, the creation of scientific celebrity, and the potential to give visibility to disability within the history of science whilst de-centring the myth of the scientific genius in museum narratives.