# Is Stephen Hawking overrated? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [March 2, 2014, 1:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644 "2014-03-02T01:18:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 5:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/21 "2014-03-02T05:35:51Z")
> [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > I agree about 90% with what **Jragon** wrote insofar as we tend to overrate our heroes despite their flaws and amplify their accomplishments. There are, however, a few people whose work does legitimately change the field dramatically; people like Max Born or Isaac Newton had fundamental insights which radically changed the way people thought about physics and brought new tools and techniques that revolutionized the field. But even they didn’t arise from a vacuum; their work, and the work of other notables, was built upon predecessors. Einstein wouldn’t have developed the theory of general relativity without the mathematics of David Hilbert; Heisenberg, Born, and Jordan would likely have never developed the matrix mechanics approach to quantum mechanics, which directly led to Heisenberg’s statement of the indeterminacy principle (the essentially core principle of quantum mechanics) without the mentorship of Heisenberg by Bohr, and Feynman wouldn’t have done his groundbreaking work on QED without the mentorship of John Archibald Wheeler. (In fact, Wheeler should probably get the grand prize for having mentored the largest number of groundbreaking physicists throughout his career and getting them started on researching in the fields that made them so famous.) Newton was important, but I think it’s still a bit over-inflated. Leibnitz doesn’t seem to get anywhere near the same amount of love (by the public – math history people adore him), and I think that while you could argue Newton was “more important” it’s not like he was a one of a kind luminary compared to contemporaries like Leibnitz. I don’t know enough about Max Born to comment, however. ---
**Author:** ![drewtwo99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/d07c76/32.png) [@drewtwo99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/drewtwo99)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 8:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/22 "2014-03-02T08:49:47Z")
I agree with Stranger that there are a few stand-out, truly revolutionary scientists/mathematcians, Newton among them (Liebnitz was no where nearly as accomplished as Newton in so many fields). I’d put Galileo, Archimedes, Maxwell, and Leonardo Da Vinci in this category easily. I don’t know if Max Born belongs but he’d be in close contention at the very least. Hawkings is not among those giants. ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/23 "2014-03-02T14:07:06Z")
It’s _Leibniz_ - no “T”… Enjoying reading this - as always, **Stranger** sums things up nicely. I am too much of a layman to add comment of value, but found A Brief History of Time kinda meh at best. Many other Physics for Civilians books I prefer ahead of that one. **Stranger** - you mention a few game-changers. What about Niels Bohr? His atomic model was a bold leap, connecting a bunch of thinking and an essential step on the way to many avenues of science. And his approach to atomic power in the face of politics and war was consistent and honorable. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/24 "2014-03-02T15:42:51Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > I didn’t read the link, which has now been removed, but: How good he is _as a writer of popular science books_ is a perfectly legitimate question, albeit one that is separate from how good he is as a scientist. True, but “how good a popular science writer is he?” wasn’t the question asked. > [@](#): > > _A Brief History of Time_ is one of the best-selling popular science books—how much of this is because of the book’s own merits and how much because its author is famous for being a brilliant yet physically challenged scientist? I’d say about 50/50. At a certain point the book’s own popularity gave it a boost and people bought it not because they wanted to read it but because it was popular. > [@tellyworth](#): > > Considering he’s limited to about [one word per minute](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21323-the-man-who-saves-stephen-hawkings-voice.html#.UxK_1dwbE-Y), I think his prose can be forgiven for being a little plain. This is an important thing to remember. Hawking is going to be terse. He doesn’t have a choice. Anyone incapable of normal speech or using their hands is going to be sharply limited in speed. We’ve seen that here with the poster **blinkie** - intelligent guy, but writes in a very terse manner due to communication limitations. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/25 "2014-03-02T16:27:01Z")
He gets asked his opinion on all sorts of things, but outside of his field of expertise these opinions tend to be quite half-baked. …which you can say about most celebrities of course. But it did annoy me when he said philosophy was dead, given that he often engages in (flawed) philosophical arguments himself. Within his field it can’t be disputed that he has made a substantial contribution. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/26 "2014-03-02T17:12:03Z")
> [@drewtwo99](#): > > (Liebnitz was no where nearly as accomplished as Newton in so many fields) Maybe not as much of a “game-changer” as Newton was, but Leibniz was pretty damn impressive his own self. > [@](#): > > Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was one of the great thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is known as the last “universal genius”. He made deep and important contributions to the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of religion, as well as mathematics, physics, geology, jurisprudence, and history. Even the eighteenth-century French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, whose views were very often at odds with those of Leibniz, could not help being awed by his achievement, writing in his entry on Leibniz in the Encyclopedia, “Perhaps never has a man read as much, studied as much, meditated more, and written more than Leibniz… What he has composed on the world, God, nature, and the soul is of the most sublime eloquence. If his ideas had been expressed with the flair of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.” (Oeuvres complètes, vol. 7, p. 709) Indeed, Diderot was almost moved to despair in this piece: “When one compares the talents one has with those of a Leibniz, one is tempted to throw away one’s books and go die quietly in the dark of some forgotten corner.” > > -[The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/) > [@](#): > > Leibniz developed the infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and Leibniz’s mathematical notation has been widely used ever since it was published. It was only in the 20th century that his Law of Continuity and Transcendental Law of Homogeneity found mathematical implementation (by means of non-standard analysis). He became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. While working on adding automatic multiplication and division to Pascal’s calculator, he was the first to describe a pinwheel calculator in 1685[6] and invented the Leibniz wheel, used in the arithmometer, the first mass-produced mechanical calculator. He also refined the binary number system, which is at the foundation of virtually all digital computers. > > In philosophy, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, e.g., his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or prior definitions rather than to empirical evidence. > > Leibniz made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in philosophy, probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science. He wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibniz’s contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters, and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin, French, and German. > > -[Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz) And, yes: > [@WordMan](#): > > It’s _Leibniz_ - no “T”… Also, “Hawking,” not “Hawkings.” > [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](#): > > The o.p. does get points, however, for not misspelling or mangling Stephen Hawking’s name as many people seem to do. > [@Broomstick](#): > > True, but “how good a popular science writer is he?” wasn’t the question asked. I thought it was included in “what do you think of him as a scientist and author?” ---
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/27 "2014-03-02T18:11:24Z")
> [@Jragon](#): > > Newton was important, but I think it’s still a bit over-inflated. Leibnitz doesn’t seem to get anywhere near the same amount of love (by the public – math history people adore him), and I think that while you could argue Newton was “more important” it’s not like he was a one of a kind luminary compared to contemporaries like Leibnitz. Both Gottfried Leibnez and Isaac Newton made multiple, wide-ranging, and fundamental parallel contributions to mathematics (most notably infinitesimal calculus) and “natural philosophy” (e.g. what we now call the physical sciences, including physical mechanics, optics, chemistry, et cetera). However, the two had very different fundamental approaches. Newton was essentially an applied mathematician and physical empiricist, i.e. he was very focused on finding mathematical models and descriptions of physical phenomena, including gravitation, optics, and chemistry. Leibnez, on the other hand, was more of an abstract mathematician and philosophy. Many of Leibnez’s innovations, aside from the notation and tools in calculus, were in areas of discrete mathematics and the ontology of systems of thought and action (which presages computation theory used in modern computers along with machine intelligence and heuristics), whereas Netwon was generally more concerned with describing the behavior of the world as observed. In more prosaic terms, Leibnez was concerned more with the “Why?” and “Who?” of physics and its underlying language (mathematics) whereas Newton cared more about “How?”, “When?”, and “Where?”. Of course, Leibnez also anticipated (in crude form) the essential relativity of the underlying plenum of what we would now term space-time whereas Newton assumed it to be a static and invariant background, but given the crude state of knowledge about the world it is hard to fault or reward either on that basis. > [@WordMan](#): > > **Stranger** - you mention a few game-changers. What about Niels Bohr? His atomic model was a bold leap, connecting a bunch of thinking and an essential step on the way to many avenues of science. And his approach to atomic power in the face of politics and war was consistent and honorable. Bohr’s assumption of a quantized model was a leap, but honestly, if he hadn’t made it someone else would have; the groundwork for the stochastic nature and discrete energy levels was already in place due to the work of Ludwig Boltzmann and Max Planck, even though neither of those men fully appreciated or accepted the consequences of their discoveries. This is not to slight Bohr, who shares at least an equal degree of credit for the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (which, despite its incomplete nature, is the only presently fully workable interpretation that doesn’t make unverifiable and speculative claims about the nature of quantum mechanics. And Bohr certainly mentored and promoted many of the physicists who came after him and matured the field. But I don’t think Bohr by himself should be considered a prime mover; if you want to go to that point in QM, it would have to be Boltzmann (for his work on establishing the stochastic approach to thermodynamics and physical mechanics) and Planck (in his stunning, if reluctant, discovery that fundamental interactions happen at discrete energy levels.). Stranger ---
**Author:** ![WordMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e8c25b/32.png) [@WordMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WordMan)\ **Post date:** [March 2, 2014, 8:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/28 "2014-03-02T20:15:36Z")
All makes sense - thanks! ---
**Author:** ![Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aji_de_gallina/32/260_2.png) [@Aji\_de\_Gallina](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aji_de_Gallina)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2014, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644/29 "2014-03-04T04:00:07Z")
> [@Yellow\_Kazooie](#): > > Well, as far as I know Hawking never contradicted himself. > > And Neil deGrasse Tyson is a cool guy. It is fun to listen to him on StarTalkRadio His newest study does away with event horizons, and in the classic sense, even with black holes. Hawking was black-hole guy. He may be cool (not for me), but lots of people fawn over his every word like he was inventing the wheel. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-stephen-hawking-overrated/682644.md?page=1)