Also, I don't believe that Hawking ever stopped working on cosmology. He may have been somewhat washed up or was riding our earlier successes. But, you know, the exact same criticism applies to Albert Einstein, whose later work was mostly fruitless as far as I know. And yet everybody goes around putting up posters on classroom walls showing Einstein in his old age, with his crazy hair or tongue sticking out, usually completely ignorant of anything he did besides being able to recite an equation he came up with as a much, much younger man!

I think I just have an unusual understanding of the word inspire. It always sounded odd to me to hear it used in that way. I guess I know what they're actually saying and I don't have a problem with that.

That all said, I have to admit that your point about people among the general public catching wind of Hawking's celebrity completely appart from his actual work is pretty apt. Because, you know, your criticism here actually applies to yourself.

Look, you probably have some interesting points about how people see disability and talent, but clearly you don't know much about Hawking's work (or cosmology in general) to be able to accurately gauge his actual impact in the subject without being blinded by perceptions of things that have nothing to do with physics.

Anyway, most of what you wrote rings true, but the part about him being a footnote still betrays a lot of ignorance.

Maybe I'm pushing a bit too far down, but I stand by the general point. Stephen Hawking's work is confined to a pretty narrow field and is not relevant for most of theoretical physics.

And this is where you betray your ignorance on cosmology. Do you think quantum gravity is a "narrow subfield" of physics? Read what I quoted from quantum gravity expert Steve Carlip. Hawking's work is an essential conceptual and quantitative tool to this day that must stress test any candidate for a unified theory of physics.

What's more interesting to me regarding the popularity of Hawking's work is not the what, so much as the who: Carlip cites the work of Hawking together with Berkenstein, a physicist who actually proposed that black holes could have well defined entropy two years before Hawking relied on the same idea when proposing what is now called Hawking radiation.

Is it wrong that virtually nobody knows who Berkenstein is? Sure. But only in the way that almost nobody knows who Minkowski, Lorentz, or Poincare are, but give Einstein all the celebrity.

In the end, though, I suppose the reason why Einstein and Hawking got all the credit for either set of ideas drawn upon in their respective works, is that despite their relative lack of originality, they were brilliant enough to embed them in a robust and quantitative theory, rather than just speculation.

Yeah, he's one of probably about twenty physicists whose work were important in developing current ideas in quantum gravity.

It's clear you've already made your mind up, and I'm not about to start reading a bunch of selectively picked quotes. Neither of us are experts in any regard here. I don't think we have much to gain in squabbling about this.

I forgot there's an XKCD comic for everything!

Ok, so you agree that he's not a "footnote"? And that only somebody who doesn't care or know about quantum gravity would pretend that he is?

Also, I will add that even though Hawking isn't the only physicist to contribute to quantum gravity, from the quotation I cited by Steve Carlip, Hawking's work is about the only tool available that relates G and hbar. So it's still misleading to try to dilute his contribution by saying he's just "one of twenty or so", since in this case (i.e., predictions that no correct theory of quantum gravity ought to contradict), it looks the tools provided by his work make for the only game in town.

We wouldn't have to "squabble" over it and I wouldn't have to dig up quotes if you weren't spreading non-sense about the merits of Hawking's work in the first place. I don't have to be an expert to cite one that shows you clearly aren't one yourself.

Also, this is not about me having "already made up my mind", so much as me trying to help you understand what cosmologists actually think about Hawking's work. This is not just something you get to have an opinion on and pretend that the whole thing is subjective. If you want to believe that Stephen Hawking is "overrated" (whatever that means), fine, but that has nothing to do with how physicists view his work.

I couldn't care less about whether the general public prefers Einstein to Minkowski, or Hawking to Berkenstein. Maybe it's crazy hair, maybe it's a wheelchair. Either way, the reasons are probably stupid, but it's equally stupid to pretend that either Einstein or Hawking don't deserve their celebrity among physicists just because of some harebrained public perception of them.

What's offensive to me is that your kneejerk reaction to Hawking's celebrity among the public has somehow caused you to underrate him as a physicist, causing you to say ridiculous things like that he is a "footnote", whereas I would wager (though I couldn't say for sure) that if an experiment could confirm Hawking radiation, he would have been a contender for a Nobel prize.

Saying he was a footnote was a bit too much.



There are plenty of experts who also say things similar to what I'm saying, and it's not hard to find.



Hawking doesn't have celebrity among physicists. Not in the way you're presenting now.

OK, now you are readnig too deeply into my words to find disagreement. You are right that Hawking doesn't have celebrity among most physicists, because, well, most physicists except for a small handful of legends like Richard Feynman aren't celebrities. I shouldn't have used the word celebrity, especially because the whole phenomenon of celebrity is rightfully downplayed in science. Hawking doesn't need to be a celebrity. Instead, he could have claimed to be the leading expert in his field, which is better than being a celebrity anyway.

Name one who works in cosmology or quantum gravity.

And don't forget that science is highly competitive, and often petty. I don't doubt for a minute that there are physicists out there who resent the amount of public attention that Hawking has enjoyed. But that says more about them than Hawking. As far as balanced expertise in quantum gravity, well, you're not going to find someone more knowledgeable about the topic than Steve Carlip. Carlip works on quantum gravity, and has done so more most of his career. If he says Hawking radiation is important, than you can bet that it's important.

"The" leading expert in his field is debatable. And lol if you think celebrity is downplayed in science.

It was categorically wrong. But I'm glad we agree.

In black hole thermodynamics? He certainly was in the 70's, when his work was current. I have no idea what has happened now, but whoever the leading expert is at this point, everything they do will be based on Hawking's work.

I mean among people who care about the science. Just look at how irritated Murray Gell-Mann gets at the celebrity of Feynman. At the end of the day, physicists care about your work, not your anecdotes. That doesn't mean that celebrities can't arise, but that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. We can cite you, or somebody else, regardless of how famous you are, if it's your work that is useful.

Man, if I took the time to harass you over every categorically wrong thing you said. And here it's not even true. Lol, take a break dude.

It's a minor point, but it's not something somebody who knew anything about Hawking's work would ever say. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to educate you. Either that you were just being needlessly sloppy.

Yeah, his work will be cited and use, just like dozens of other physicists of the 1970's, in the future.

Nope, you are still underrating him. Lots of physicists get their work cited, but very few have the impact that Hawking has had.

Also, I thought you were sick of talking about this?

I'm fine w/ the discussion forum only having one mega current events thread and then bits and bobs of other things here and there, but at this point, at least half of each page of this thread is this exact back and forth

w...was FGR right? Should we have followed him into oblivion?

This will be my last post on the subject. You're really good at being inflammatory and baiting me back when I've long since been bored of you repeating the same lines, quoting people you can't step to saying things you don't comprehend. You're also good at seeming like you have an opinion worth hearing on topics. But currently I'm not interested in listening to your pedantic ****flinging over a topic nobody cares about.

OK, I see that you wrote "dozens" now. That seems fair.

Yes, let's end the discussion, since I think we understand each other.

Edit: kind of? You say this is your last post, and you complain about my inflammatory tone... but then you yourself have littered your post with baseless insults toward me. The parts where you try to undermine my credibility by making it sound like I don't know what I am talking about also just go to demonstrate your lack of interest in the facts on this topic, since I haven't said anything remotely controversial among actual experts. lol

Yes, he probably was right.

Also, hey, I care about quantum gravity. I think the subject is incredibly fascinating. In fact I wish more people would share my fascination (which to me is far more interesting than Stephen Hawking's struggle with disability, however inspiring it may be). I know you didn't invoke Hawking to discuss anything about physics though. And I am the first to admit that I went about it the wrong way in trying to interest you in the subject. If I had started the discussion with a gentle question rather than an inflammatory rebuttal, we probably could have had a pleasant discussion about an argument for Stephen Hawking actually being underrated by people outside of quantum gravity.

And I feel I did have something to contribute here, that was burried beneath bruised egos. Of course, though, my tactlessness (as usual) got the best of me, and thus I lost this battle the minute I forced you to choose between acquiring an intrinsic interest in the subject and conceding something competitive about your original rhetorical point. I have to admit that I find the discussion on disabilities less interesting than physics, and I admit that you would certainly be reasonable in calling this pedantry. Anyway, you are welcome to carry this on if you want to talk about the physics, but otherwise I agree that I am being a total pill here.

I'd like to read Jon's take on Hawking's importance. Reid reads like a parody of himself so I don't take those posts seriously.

Conversations about whether something or someone is overrated might be the most pointless kind of conversation there is. Yikes.

Could very well be I'm just an idiot about everything, yeah. I honestly didn't think you even read my posts, nonetheless had an opinion.

You're right. I shouldn't have said anything on that to begin with.

I gotta admit, though, that whenever Reid would take something out of somebody's post in order to make a point about philosophy, and the person making the original point got annoyed that some minor bit of language was being blown up into a big discussion in order to "educate" him on something that he probably saw as tangential... well, now I'm doing the exact see thing, but with physics! So I'll agree, I should stop. Nobody should be forced to have an intrinsic interest in physics, just like nobody should be forced to have an intrinsic interest in philosophy.

I think my main problem is that I sabatoge my own success in convincing people to change their mind on something, because I will invariably use the opportunity to insult them first. :downs:

(Sorry if that emoticon is offensive.)

Also, while I have enough background in physics to have a certain amount of confidence here, it's also possible that I'm just flat out wrong.

Well, as you've said in the past, how important are details anyway, really?

In this case, not very important. I wrote that to make a point about the relationship the public has with disability, and I feel that point was taken pretty well. The point about Hawking wasn't super important and wasn't a hill worth dying on, regardless of what I feel about the truth of the matter.

I don’t think you get to be Lucasian chair for being a cripple.