I've thought Hawking was being a bit over-marketed since the Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode where they place him next to Newton and Einstein as three great physicists in history. That scene was a lot of fun and I'm glad they did it. But there's a lot of room for being a great physicist without being a Newton or an Einstein, and that does seem to apply to Hawking, even if you agree completely with this article.
Well, Newton and Hawking did both hold the same chair. If Cambridge is willing to put them beside each other Im not going to complain about Star Trek doing the same.
I agree that it's hard to compare people's intellect, especially dead vs living. However Newton and Einstein were humen as well, and not unlikely had their importance subject to exaggeration, misrepresentation and misunderstanding. When you become a celebrity other factors than significance comes into play, sometimes out of the control of the person.
True. But Newton and Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe in a way that a Feynman, Hawking or Gell-Mann didn't. I doubt these gentlemen would have disagreed with that.
I'd be much more willing to put Gell-Mann on that list than Hawking or Feynman. To me, his discovery of the ability to make accurate predictions about the existence of fundamental particles based on symmetry groups forms a pillar of theoretical particle physics and the composition of the Standard Model, in the same kind of way that Einstein's application of differential geometry to the concept of space-time does.
Newton will sort of always stand apart in that he was "the first", but I think that grouping Gell-Mann (no pun intended) with Hawking and Feynman, who although both brilliant and huge personalities, weren't the same level of "giant upon whose shoulders others stand" that Einstein and Gell-Mann's work ended up being is somewhat unfair.
According to the book "When Einstein Walked with Gödel"
Einstein was not comfortable with all the attention and adoration
he was receiving.
One of the reason Einstein and Gödel spent a lot of time together
was that he did not care how famous Einstein was, and was not afraid
to disagree. He was also not shy about sharing his own work with Einstein.
Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel"
So the book is critical about the fact that Hawking was a celebrity, among other things. I get it, but personally I'd much prefer it there were more phycisists, mathematicians, doctors, biologists, etc etc. celebrities. We spend way too much time and money on people who kick a ball for a living, or who pretend to sing or act, while displaying their good looks. We can do better than that.
Science/engineering influencers are becoming more popular and doing a great job getting themselves funding and also generating very impressive content.
Look into -
https://www.veritasium.com/ - crazy science education and practical experiments to “prove new science”. Check out the series of videos on a sail powered car that moves faster than the wind that pushes it!!! It sounds impossible, and then Derek shows that it’s possible! Including all the debates with other scientists about it. Also check out the “how energy flows” and all the reaction videos - this topic hasn’t yet been explored further tho so be prepared to wait (if this type of conversation isn’t science I don’t know what is).
Mark Rober’s creative engineering classes, science based philanthropy with TeamSeas are meeting his goal of being effectively inspiring. This dude is going to generate a similar magnitude of new scientists and engineers as The Beatles have and keep generating new musicians.
https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai - People always wonder why I’m optimistic about the future. Karoly and his channel are a small but important part of why! Watching the pace of innovation here is the only way to truly understand the catch phrase “What a time to be alive!”. He curates scientific papers and gets them visibility better than the legacy science publications. This channel is the “new Nature magazine” and it’s funded by relevant/educational ads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris - Hamilton’s work documenting the effects of narcotics and also the scientific pathways behind them is inspiring. His team and him haven't so much created videos or video essays as they have created the first audio-visual encyclopedia.
I’m sure there are many more I’m forgetting or haven’t yet heard of. You can also look into the Stanford/Harvard professors, the research doctors, the dermatologists, etc that are getting into YouTube/podcasts because it’s a better medium to have scientific information disseminated and hopefully draw more donations for their research.
Not all science influencers are doing “real science” yet. Some of them are “science news/educators” others “science documentarians” but many of them are already directly contributing to “real innovative science”. Pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and getting ”paid” to show it off!!!
Yes it takes a bit of curation to find the content creators that are also doing “real science” but for me it’s a no-brainer: in 100 years, because of the monetary incentives, more innovation will come from donation/ad based “science content creators” (on YouTube/podcasts/similar) than from legacy academic institutions.
AFAIK the French are more prone to scientific celebrities, but this has led to cult like institutions. Here competition for popular attention has led to increasingly outlandish claims and predictions. I would be happier with less scientific celebrities and less politics in science. A dry, austere, monkish existence where the only reward is recognition from your immediate peers.
I used to be critical of athlete worship, as many nerds are, until I actually started becoming athletic.
I still don't like sports culture, but I appreciate athleticism much more now. Intelligence, while important, is not the sole measure of a persons value, and its not a bad thing for a culture to value physicality. It's a very human thing, just like curiosity or creativity. Of course it would be nicer if we valued intellect to the same degree, but here we are.
Point is, its not just kicking a ball. Its a lifetime of work and passion. A scientist does not have greater moral worth than an athlete or artist. These aren't worthless pursuits only idiots focus on.
I think a comparison of the relative impact of Nobel Prize winners and Olympic gold medal winners would dispute your claim regarding moral worth. I can’t think of an athletic equivalent to the invention of vaccines, solar power, democracy, the internet, or even the concept of morality itself.
In the grand scheme, those things are more important. But coming up with an idea or solving a puzzle does not make a person better than another. Getting an Olympic medal could take equivalent effort to making a major scientific breakthrough. Its just that the kind of effort being made is different.
Hawking was perhaps unusual in being both a very accomplished physicist and a very accomplished physics communicator, explaining the concepts of modern physics to the public. Sagan, I think, was neither a particularly accomplished scientist, nor seriously claimed or tried to be, unlike some modern science communicators, but was enormously accomplished in bringing science to the public. Many accomplished scientists would likewise be terrible communicating ideas to the public, and make little attempt to. Hawking was not Einstein, or Newton, but to argue that he did not make major contributions to research does not seem reasonable; nor is it reasonable to dismiss someone's contributions by comparing them to the most prominent contributors over multiple centuries.
But Hawking did perhaps shift focus gradually from one to the other. It is hard to do research while also devoting so much time and effort explaining science to the public, and it is perhaps hard to maintain a serious scholarly perspective while focusing on simplifying concepts and explanations for a general audience. The fame itself can be an impediment, too. I can recall one scientist, somewhat famous for what was then somewhat of a side project, who noted with some annoyance that whenever he posted something on arXiv, it would be leapt upon by journalists who would contact him and the university asking about the paper's connection to the topic, when, of course, it had nothing to do with that. The authors of the Wikipedia article on The large-scale structure of space-time, meanwhile, find it
necessary to repeatedly note that is not for a general audience, something not done for something like the phone book / MTW. The reviewer disagrees with the author on when Hawking stopped making significant contributions to science, but I think it can be generally agreed that he did, at some point, while still making major contributions to the popularity and public understanding of physics.
I can remember one of my earlier experiences as a graduate student was going to what may have been one of Hawking's last research talks, in the mid-2000s. The group had to leave that week's meeting off the public departmental calendar that usually listed our seminar, lest the public swarm our small seminar room. He gave what remains, to this day, one of the most awkward and embarrassingly bad research talks I have ever been to. It entirely lacked rigour and seemed to make little sense at all. It almost felt like a talk an amateur fan of his would give about ideas they devised after reading his popular books. The sole question, from a prominent physicist whose name would likely be recognized here, but not to the public, was brutal, somewhat off-handedly dismissing the entire premise of the talk from basic physics considerations. Hawking's only response was to say that the questioner's argument might be right.
Sadly, as the reviewer suggests, it may be that Hawking needed to shift his focus to popularizing science and courting the media in order to afford the care that would allow him to continue to live decently. It may not have been what he would have preferred. There are prominent scholars who continue to make significant contributions to research despite their age, who continue to be part of the scholarly conversation. The saddest part of the talk, when I thought about it later, was the sense that he seemed to almost be pleading with the audience to still be a participant in that conversation. He was an old friend of some of the faculty in the room. He had likely been one of the inspirations to more students in the room than just me, having read his popular works as a child and The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time a bit later. But I think it was clear to everyone that he was no longer part of the conversation. In science, at least, the name died before the man. Better it died, I think, by him moving into popularizing science than him moving into dubious quantum claims.
Hawking's reputation can take the hit, and it's always good to have a skeptical counterpoint to a hagiographical mainstream. Reexamining someone's intellectual legacy now and then is worthwhile.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemat...
Newton will sort of always stand apart in that he was "the first", but I think that grouping Gell-Mann (no pun intended) with Hawking and Feynman, who although both brilliant and huge personalities, weren't the same level of "giant upon whose shoulders others stand" that Einstein and Gell-Mann's work ended up being is somewhat unfair.
One of the reason Einstein and Gödel spent a lot of time together was that he did not care how famous Einstein was, and was not afraid to disagree. He was also not shy about sharing his own work with Einstein.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del
How far can that go?
See: Buffalo⁸
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...)
Hawking! Stephen Hawking!
Hawking hawking. Stephen Hawking peddling aggressively.
Hawking hawking hawking. Stephen Hawking peddling "hunting with hawks."
Hawking Hawking hawking hawking. A throat-cleering Stephen Hawking peddling the idea of hawking
Hawking Hawking hawking hawking hawking. A throat-cleering Stephen Hawking peddling "throat-clearing hawking"
Hawking Hawking hawking hawking Hawking hawking. A throat-cleering Stephen Hawking peddling "throat-clearing Stephen Hawking hawking"
That's rather rude considering the man was wheelchair bound, don't you think?
It would change science sure, but monogrammed Microscopes and signed stethoscopes are probably better than the equivalent in makeup and fast fashion.
Science/engineering influencers are becoming more popular and doing a great job getting themselves funding and also generating very impressive content.
Look into -
https://www.veritasium.com/ - crazy science education and practical experiments to “prove new science”. Check out the series of videos on a sail powered car that moves faster than the wind that pushes it!!! It sounds impossible, and then Derek shows that it’s possible! Including all the debates with other scientists about it. Also check out the “how energy flows” and all the reaction videos - this topic hasn’t yet been explored further tho so be prepared to wait (if this type of conversation isn’t science I don’t know what is).
Mark Rober’s creative engineering classes, science based philanthropy with TeamSeas are meeting his goal of being effectively inspiring. This dude is going to generate a similar magnitude of new scientists and engineers as The Beatles have and keep generating new musicians.
https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai - People always wonder why I’m optimistic about the future. Karoly and his channel are a small but important part of why! Watching the pace of innovation here is the only way to truly understand the catch phrase “What a time to be alive!”. He curates scientific papers and gets them visibility better than the legacy science publications. This channel is the “new Nature magazine” and it’s funded by relevant/educational ads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris - Hamilton’s work documenting the effects of narcotics and also the scientific pathways behind them is inspiring. His team and him haven't so much created videos or video essays as they have created the first audio-visual encyclopedia.
I’m sure there are many more I’m forgetting or haven’t yet heard of. You can also look into the Stanford/Harvard professors, the research doctors, the dermatologists, etc that are getting into YouTube/podcasts because it’s a better medium to have scientific information disseminated and hopefully draw more donations for their research.
Not all science influencers are doing “real science” yet. Some of them are “science news/educators” others “science documentarians” but many of them are already directly contributing to “real innovative science”. Pushing the boundaries of human knowledge and getting ”paid” to show it off!!!
Yes it takes a bit of curation to find the content creators that are also doing “real science” but for me it’s a no-brainer: in 100 years, because of the monetary incentives, more innovation will come from donation/ad based “science content creators” (on YouTube/podcasts/similar) than from legacy academic institutions.
- More money flowing into science
- More talent flowing into science
I still don't like sports culture, but I appreciate athleticism much more now. Intelligence, while important, is not the sole measure of a persons value, and its not a bad thing for a culture to value physicality. It's a very human thing, just like curiosity or creativity. Of course it would be nicer if we valued intellect to the same degree, but here we are.
Point is, its not just kicking a ball. Its a lifetime of work and passion. A scientist does not have greater moral worth than an athlete or artist. These aren't worthless pursuits only idiots focus on.
But Hawking did perhaps shift focus gradually from one to the other. It is hard to do research while also devoting so much time and effort explaining science to the public, and it is perhaps hard to maintain a serious scholarly perspective while focusing on simplifying concepts and explanations for a general audience. The fame itself can be an impediment, too. I can recall one scientist, somewhat famous for what was then somewhat of a side project, who noted with some annoyance that whenever he posted something on arXiv, it would be leapt upon by journalists who would contact him and the university asking about the paper's connection to the topic, when, of course, it had nothing to do with that. The authors of the Wikipedia article on The large-scale structure of space-time, meanwhile, find it necessary to repeatedly note that is not for a general audience, something not done for something like the phone book / MTW. The reviewer disagrees with the author on when Hawking stopped making significant contributions to science, but I think it can be generally agreed that he did, at some point, while still making major contributions to the popularity and public understanding of physics.
I can remember one of my earlier experiences as a graduate student was going to what may have been one of Hawking's last research talks, in the mid-2000s. The group had to leave that week's meeting off the public departmental calendar that usually listed our seminar, lest the public swarm our small seminar room. He gave what remains, to this day, one of the most awkward and embarrassingly bad research talks I have ever been to. It entirely lacked rigour and seemed to make little sense at all. It almost felt like a talk an amateur fan of his would give about ideas they devised after reading his popular books. The sole question, from a prominent physicist whose name would likely be recognized here, but not to the public, was brutal, somewhat off-handedly dismissing the entire premise of the talk from basic physics considerations. Hawking's only response was to say that the questioner's argument might be right.
Sadly, as the reviewer suggests, it may be that Hawking needed to shift his focus to popularizing science and courting the media in order to afford the care that would allow him to continue to live decently. It may not have been what he would have preferred. There are prominent scholars who continue to make significant contributions to research despite their age, who continue to be part of the scholarly conversation. The saddest part of the talk, when I thought about it later, was the sense that he seemed to almost be pleading with the audience to still be a participant in that conversation. He was an old friend of some of the faculty in the room. He had likely been one of the inspirations to more students in the room than just me, having read his popular works as a child and The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time a bit later. But I think it was clear to everyone that he was no longer part of the conversation. In science, at least, the name died before the man. Better it died, I think, by him moving into popularizing science than him moving into dubious quantum claims.
After that ...