Was on Amazon, looking for a copy of the Brief History of Time docu for my dad. Got to wondering if Stephen Hawking really is the smartest guy alive, or at least in physics.
Now, I’m not knocking him. I know that he’s accomplished a lot in his lifetime, and that as an Oxford undergrad, he was a phenomenon. But is he still performing at that level? I know some people tend to plateau after college.
Or is he just the most famous, on the grounds that
It’s such a miracle for him to have survived this long with ALS, it leads people to think that there’s a Reason he was able to continue his research,
He can play the publicity game better than most academic types,
and
He’s been able to publish more findings than other physicists*. I know that research never really “concludes”, but at some point, you have to publish something, and it looks a lot better to be able to definitively say, “It’s like this” rather than, “We still don’t know.”
So is he the best, or just the best-known?
*And I also know that he doesn’t work strictly alone, but anything with his name attached to it is naturally going to get more attention.
I don’t know a great deal about the world of physics. But any guy that occupies Newton’s chair at Cambridge has to be considered one of the tops in his field. I am sure there are other physicist in the world that specialize in precise areas of physics and are thereby considered to be tops in their specific field.
My own personal opinion is that he is one of the best, but not perhaps the best in the field; that honor might go to someone like Whitten instead. But really, at this level, it doesn’t really matter… They’re both very good. Hawking does, I think, get better publicity, though.
Yes, I do realise that one or two of the following remarks may seem weird to most people …
Terms like “best” and “smartest” aren’t a terribly good way to think of such professional reputations.
In a competative field like theoretical physics, it’s primarily ideas that are smart. To the extent that even when you say to someone “oh, that’s clever”, you’re not explicitly acknowledging that they might be smarter than you. It’s a “damn, I wish I’d thought of that” moment. The result is that every last professional in the field secretly thinks/hopes that they’re actually as smart as, well, you name them. And this is perfectly healthy in that it means that nobody is above criticism. The grad student asking the question at the seminar might well be the person who’s come up with the “damn, I wish I’d thought of that” objection or insight.
That said, nobody in the field would think that Hawking is anything other than at the top of the profession. (I almost phrased that as “a natural candidate for Lucasian professor”, but there have been some odd holders of that office over the centuries, so I didn’t.)
If the issue is influence, then there are several people whose significance can be argued to be greater (even much greater). And I’d expect a poll of the qualified to reveal a concensus for Ed Witten as the prodigous theoretical physicist of our times.
First, a clarificiation: Witten’s field and Hawking’s field are not all that comparable. Witten primarily works in string theory these days, which grew out from attempts to describe gravity in the framework on particle physics. Meanwhile, Hawking is best known in the scientific community for postulating the existence of black hole radiation, which he derived from studying how a background gravitational field affects particle physics. They’re comparable in the sense that they’re both loking at how gravity and particle physics (as currently understood) might interact, but their respective approaches are different: Witten’s comes from the idea that particle physics is fundamental, while Hawking’s views general relativity as fundamental.
Hawking’s main work in GR was done in the 70s; at the time, general relativity was undergoing a major “cleaning house”. The subject was essentially reformulated in a more rigourous, mathematical structure that allowed it to be better understood. Hawking was one of the more notable figures the field at the time — in particular, his monograph “The Large-Scale Structure of Spacetime” is still the best book on the subject, 30 years later. But there were quite a few others: Bob Geroch, in particular, was particularly influential (and prodigious), as were Roger Penrose, Bob Wald, Bill Unruh, and Kip Thorne. (These are just off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ve forgotten at least one name that should be on this list.)
Interestingly enough, I think that (with the exception of Unruh) all of the above people wrote books on general relativity that were intended for a popular audience. Only Hawking’s ended up on the NYT best-seller list, though. (I think it pre-dated the rest, but I could be wrong.)
Disclaimer: I’m a graduate student in physics; Bob Wald is my advisor.
I don’t know about Whitten, but I’ve read both of Hawkings famous books (Brief History of Time/Universe in a Nutshell) and he comes off as a very normal, kind of cool guy. He makes fun of the fact that he’s in a wheel chair and makes lots of jokes in both of those books. That certainly makes him very popular among people who aren’t “physics-geeks” like myself…
I’m not quite sure how true this perception is, but I think that normally the really great scientific/mathematical discoveries get made fairly early in someone’s career, and then they spend the rest of it mentoring, writing books, trying to broaden their knowledge, etc.
So I don’t think the fact that the next revolution almost certainly won’t come from Hawking (or any other established scientist), but some young up-and-coming genius spending 23 hours a day poring over obscure diagrams somewhere, doesn’t mean he is, or isn’t smarter.