Stephen Hawking - Just how much has he really contributed to physics?

[Dr B]

Another programme on TV the other night about Hawking - it was interesting.

It is not my field - but how would others here describe the contribution of Hawking to the world of physics? Is he really the genius the media always portrays him as? Would you place him in your top 5 physicists of all time? Or is he good - but just got better media relations than other much better physicists working today?

Or are you all very cynical and think that at least some fo the media's pre-occupation with him is due, partly, to his disability?

So one question is about his contribution to physics and one about his media coverage over the years.

{PS - note - the above are questions and not statements. I am a fan of Hawking, but part of me can't help but think that there are many more brilliant minds out there doing plenty (perhaps even more) but just not engaging with the public so much} O0

[Mulder]

Perhaps you should get a wheelchair, Dr B ... :smiley:

[Dr B]

No way - I need less, not more distraction.....:smiley:

[Mulder]

Would you place him in your top 5 physicists of all time?

I can tell you my top 5 records of all time, my top 5 TV shows, even my top 5 holidays but top 5 physicists? :undecided:

[bobdezon]

I think to garner public interest the media always elects a poster child for a cause. This cause célèbre has its uses, but I feel it also pigeonholes a lot of people. It typecasts them forever in the public eye. I respect Hawkins work, I think he is a great, history will remember him as such. There are more like him though that do work that is just as good if not better yet recieve no recognition (publicly) they are content to advance mankind, and not worry about media representation unless funding is an issue.

Besides I think Hawkins was a fool to leak his sex tape.

http://www.devileash.com/1825-Stephen_Hawking_Sex_Tape.html

[FarSideOfTheMoon]

I think there are probably many copies of his book that haven't been read beyond page 1.

[Julia]

Completely off topic, but does Leeds have the only bus station in Britain at which the bus times are announced by an American-accented synthetic voice? There's something bloody unnerving about hearing Stephen Hawking inform you that "The 22.50 bus to York will depart from bay number eleven." :shocked:

[Cuddles]

It's hard to say really (about Hawking that is, not the buses). There's no doubt that he is one hell of a clever bastard, but when it comes down to it, there's really no such thing as the "top five physicists of all time". It's just not possible to compare people in any sensible way. The vast majority of his work is highly theoretical physics, and most of it can have no practical use in the forseeable future. For example, it's all very well knowing that black holes will evaporate after billions of years, but how useful is it really to know that? There are probably thousands of physicists alive today whose work has been more useful than his simply because it is actually used at all. Most of them won't have as far reaching consequences across different fields, but does that really make them any worse than him?

Another important point is the whole "standing on the shoulders of giants" thing. No physics today could exist without the work of thousands of other people having come before it. Einstein is often thought of as some kind of unique genius, yet none of his ideas were really original, he just gathered together many things whose time had pretty much come. If Einstein hadn't existed, it's virtually certain that someone else would have come up with exactly the same as he did. This is even more true of some others. Maxwell's equations, for example, aren't his at all. He was simply the first to put them all together and connect them, they had all been thought up well before he got hold of them.

Of course, this doesn't take away the fact that while many people could have done the same, the people we remember are (usually) the ones who actually did. However, it does mean that the popular view of a few super-genius types just isn't true. They are usually just rather clever people who happened to be working in the right field at the right time.

[ZERO]

I think if he had not written A Brief History of Time, he would be much less well known.
That book brought physics to the masses in a way.

[edd]

Physicists have voted on the top ten physicists before. I've never seen Hawking in the running
Here's one post on it
http://ideaisaac.blogspot.com/1999/12/top-ten-physicists.html

[SKIRRID5]

Cuddles, why does making a great contribution to physics have to be "useful"?

[ZERO]

Cuddles, why does making a great contribution to physics have to be "useful"?

Exactly! Good point.

What's wrong with just finding answers to things.

I hate it when people complain about science spending, space projects for example, because there is no practical use.
Stop spending on the terribly stupid military and there will be enough for a whole lot of things.

[Matt]

Exactly! Good point.

What's wrong with just finding answers to things.

I hate it when people complain about science spending, space projects for example, because there is no practical use.
Stop spending on the terribly stupid military and there will be enough for a whole lot of things.

Well there's two ways of looking at useful. One purely pragmatic. As far as that goes I agree, a contribution to physics needn't have any direct pragmatic use. Though it's often the case that what physicists see as pure research will eventually be put to good use. There's the story of Rutherford discussing cathode rays - pure science he said, of no practical benefit whatsoever. Now there are billions of cathode ray tubes in use all over the world in TV and computer monitors. Cathode rays are used to generate x-rays and reaerch into the humble electron (as this is what cathode rays turned out to be - a stream of electrons) has lead forst to thermionic valves and later to semi conductors and through them the information revolution. Then of course is the more prosaic story of the laser physicist who acidentally fried the hair folicles on his forearm. A dratted nuisance as it left a permanently bald patch. It was years before he discussed this with someone at a party who pointed out to him how much women would pay for laser hair removal - a multi million dollar industry that the physicist in his ivory tower was completely unaware he'd invented.

However even if when practical application can be found physics can be useful in pushing back the forefront of our knowledge.

The trouble with Hawkins work is that much of it is highly theoretical to the point of being to all intents and purposes unfalsifiable. It remains to be seen if his work can serve as the foundation for further discoveries. If so then while of little pragmatic benefit it is useful. If not, as seem likley for much of it, then not so useful after all.

[Cuddles]

Cuddles, why does making a great contribution to physics have to be "useful"?

I never said it did.

[SKIRRID5]

Cuddles - "For example, it's all very well knowing that black holes will evaporate after billions of years, but how useful is it really to know that?" seemed to me to say so! Unless you meant merely "useful in terms of theoretical research".
Speaking as a complete layman, I imagine that knowing black holes are going to evaporate would tell us something about their past behaviour, and so help to build a picture of how the universe has developed to its present state.

[SimonC]

We might find out just how 'theoretical' Stephen Hawking's ideas are when the Cern Large Hadron Collider goes online, in May.

Assuming we're all still around to discuss the results afterwards! ;D

[seren]

The comment about him selling loads of books that nobody's actually read has been bandied around a bit recently, and a combination of that and last week's documentary spurred me to pick up my unfinished copy of A Brief History of Time.

I can't say I understand all of it, but enough to make me marvel again at the universe. Like Dawkins, it's the bringing-it-to-the-masses that makes him great for those same masses, because we don't understand the rest of it. Duh.

[SimonC]

I think the comparison with Dawkins is spot-on, Seren. I'm not sure that either of them are quite at the current forefront of their fields in terms of research etc, but both contribute enormously by popularising their respective disciplines. All of my ( very limited ) understanding of black holes etc comes from Hawkings' work - I read Brief History of Time alongside 'Hawking for Beginners' ( illustrated by Oscar Zarate, a really great cartoonist ). I reckon that I grasped maybe a third to a half of it, but that was enough to fire my enthusiasm.

Slightly o/t, but on my bookshelf alonside Hawking's book is this -

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c153/SimonC1/book.jpg

'Relativity. An exposition without mathematics', published in 1927. It's my favourite amongst all my books, and I bought it in a second hand shop for the princely sum of 50p. :smiley: I'd love to own some of the other volumes advertised on the back -

'The Atom' by Professor E.N. da C Andrade
'The Mind and its Workings' by C.E.M Joad ( I do own his Guide to Philosophy, which is heavy going! )
'Modern Scientific Ideas' by Sir Oliver Lodge

Wonderful stuff! :smiley:

[Cuddles]

'Relativity. An exposition without mathematics', published in 1927. It's my favourite amongst all my books, and I bought it in a second hand shop for the princely sum of 50p. :smiley: I'd love to own some of the other volumes advertised on the back -

'The Atom' by Professor E.N. da C Andrade
'The Mind and its Workings' by C.E.M Joad ( I do own his Guide to Philosophy, which is heavy going! )
'Modern Scientific Ideas' by Sir Oliver Lodge

Wonderful stuff! :smiley:

You want to be careful with books that old. They may be interesting as history, but you're not going to learn any science from them. For example, the neutron wasn't discovered until 1932, so how likely are they to have anything right about the atom?

[SimonC]

You want to be careful with books that old. They may be interesting as history, but you're not going to learn any science from them. For example, the neutron wasn't discovered until 1932, so how likely are they to have anything right about the atom?

Thank you Cuddles. Perhaps I should have been clearer in my comment - I certainly wouldn't expect these kind of books to contain much ( if anything ) in the way of current scientific information, but I do enjoy them very much as 'small pieces of history'. Much as I'd enjoy reading the book by Sir Oliver Lodge in that context, he did talk about 'the aether', the afterlife etc. So, no, I wouldn't read that as anything other than an interesting, perhaps entertaining, historical artefact.

Thanks for making a fair point point though. O0

[Janot]

You want to be careful with books that old. They may be interesting as history, but you're not going to learn any science from them. For example, the neutron wasn't discovered until 1932, so how likely are they to have anything right about the atom?Very off-topic I know, but having got bored with physics and just finished a PhD in Ancient Greek (for fun::)) I am amazed how quickly books become antiquated and irrelevant. You might think this obvious in physics, but it appears to be the same in classics, which I find really surprizing. You would think that in that discipline, things might develop at a slower pace, but there are very few books over 20 years old which are worth reading. My research covered topics which had not been discussed for decades, so any books I read were useless. Other relevant PhD theses were by German 'scholars' from the beginning of the 20th century, and these were not only complete rubbish, but also written in Latin, not German.

It makes me wonder what anyone might think of my thesis in 50 years time - I can guess. At least most of it is English.

[DrS]

As an aside on your off-topic post (sorry ... :-[) it is astonishing how research in the humanities generally has changed over the last century. Early- to mid- 20th century approaches to Classics, for example, were conditioned and informed by the privilege and elitism of the researchers' own educational milieux.

Whilst it's all far more self-aware now, even to the point of being intentionally self-referential at times, I can't help wondering what today informs our research that is so conditioned as to be invisible. Maybe not Empire and class any more, but perhaps multi-culturalism ... that's my guess, anyway.

[seren]

Indeed. Edward Said, post-colonialism, Orientalism etc etc, and of course post-modernism. Certainly when I was in Uni a decade ago now (erk!) these where the two major influences. The post-modern bit causes the self-referential thing you mention.

I feel now that Orientalism and post-modernism have stifled any kind of meaningful study or discussion. We run from one and the other makes everything meaningless anyway. Re-reading that Luce Iriguray (can't remember how to spell her name and don't care. I'm being post-modern) called E=MC2 a "sexed equation" just says it all really. Nonsense.

[DrS]

I agree about post-modernism. Said's Orientalism is still seminal, for me.

[faithlessgod]

It is not my field - but how would others here describe the contribution of Hawking to the world of physics? Is he really the genius the media always portrays him as? Would you place him in your top 5 physicists of all time? Or is he good - but just got better media relations than other much better physicists working today?
I recall that he did not make the top 100 physicists which includes many living ones (including other brits who ranked higher - can't remember who) and was nominated by physicists only. At the same time he was in the top 100 Britons of all time list (and those others in the previous list were nowhere to be seen...)!


Or are you all very cynical and think that at least some fo the media's pre-occupation with him is due, partly, to his disability?
I reluctantly say yes. Is this cynical? Since this is based on the data as partly indicated above rather than just my opinion?

[Bunny]

It has not been possible to test some of Hawking's predictions based on theoretical physics as yet. As SimonC said, when the Cern Large Hadron Collider comes on line then it might be possible to do the experiments. If Hawking Radiation turns up then that's his Nobel Prize, I think.

There are plenty of examples of predictions from theoretical physicists that could not be experimentally proven until many years later.

Wolfgang Pauli predicted the existence of the sub-atomic particle, the neutrino, in 1930. He said at the time: “I have done a terrible thing, I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected”. He was almost correct; neutrinos were not shown to exist experimentally until 1953.