Again, within the world of physics, Professor Weinberg is as least as well known and at least as highly regarded as Hawking. And that’s where it matters.
Hawking is NOT overrated in academia. He’s merely overrated in the sense that the average Joe can only name ONE living physicist, and that’s Stephen Hawking. But if you asked that average Joe to summarize some of Hawking’s contributions to science, he wouldn’t know.
Fifty years ago, I could have said the same thing about Albert Einstein. If you’d asked my Mom back then to name a physicist, she’d have named Einstein. If you’d asked her to name TWO physicists, she’d have drawn a blank.
That doesn’t mean Einstein and Hawking weren’t/aren’t genuinely brilliant- it just means that fame among the public at large isn’t always directly related to stature within the science world.
Of course Weinberg Glashow and 't Hooft are also clearly physicists who have also reached the top of the tree, all three being Nobel prize winner ('t Hooft won his nobel prize precisely for his work on renormalization. However my point is that comparision is subjective as you’re comparing substantial achievements in one field with substantial achievements in another (though 't Hooft it must be said has also made substantial contributions to quantum gravity).
You simply cannot rank living physicists in a way that allows you to distinguish the top 10 from the top 20 without it being hugely subjective.
This again is my problem, it’s clear from this paragraph that you don’t really know what I am actually discussing. Which brings me back to my point, how can you assess Hawking’s contribution to physics when you don’t actually know what it is!
Before Hawking and Penrose it was believed by many that gravitational singularities in what otherwise appear physically reasonable solutions were in fact the result of over-idealization in the solution. In fact it is probably fair to say that was the tentative consensus of the early sixties (if not accepted by all). What Hawking and Penrose proved is that, under certain sets of reasonable and general enough assumptions, singularities were unavoidable in physically realistic solutions (Hawking proved this for cosmological solutions, Penrose proved this for gravitational collapse). This was very important: John Wheeler in the GR bible Gravitationdescribed the unavoidable appearance of gravitational singularities as “the greatest crisis in physics of all-time”. Hawking with Geroch, Penrose and others also built up the theory of what a gravitational singularity is (describing singularities generically is not a simple issue) and its relationship to the causal/large-scale structure of spacetime.
Are you being serious? No they did not re-discover the GR solutions from which the CMB could be deduced as these solutions are just the standard and comparatively simple FLRW solutions which have been well-known since the 1930s. What Dicke, Peebles, Peel and Robinson did was to analyse the thermodynamic properties of the Universe implied by the FLRW solutions to predict relic radiation from the early Universe. As you say this had already been done and Peebles’ major contribution is actually his related work on nucleosynthesis. Peeble’s contribution to GR is not really comparable to Hawking’s wide-ranging contributions which pushed the whole subject forward.
As I said it is more complicated than you think. To say no real progress has been made in 90 years, considering how active the field is, is to misunderstand what the problems actually are. Much of Hawking’s work in quantum gravity is general enough that it is important in all of the different approaches to the subject.
You said you lived in Austin, but you didn’t say you attended UT. Or maybe the 70’s was too early. But in the late 80’s, you literally had to carry an umbrella to avoid getting shit on in some parts of the campus.
I was a student at UT the first two years I was there and worked on campus the last year. I don’t remember hearing anything about grackles when I was there. Hey, you learn something new every day.
[SLIGHT HIJACK] No he isn’t. Aside from what he has accomplished in the suspense genre, King is also one of the best writers of Americana since Faulkner and Steinbeck. [/SLIGHT HIJACK]
It is obvious that I was referring only to the limited example of ‘t Hooft’s renormalization of electroweak theory.
Gravity has not been quantized, there is no end in sight to the search for a quantizing theory, and it is improper to evaluate anyone’s contribution until the end is in sight.
No more so than distinguishing the person in first place from all the others.
Your problem you think you can disguise your indifferent performance in this debate by resort to ad hominem.
I will help you explain your own point more clearly: for the purpose of our conversation Hawking’s work on singularity is analogous to Einstein’s 1905 Brownian Motion insight as follows: Both proved the existence of an important feature of physical reality: Einstein, atoms, Hawking, singularities.
Although Einstein’s Brownian work propelled him to high rank among theoretical physicists, it did not, by itself, propel him to first place. That took Special Relativity and the quantization of light. Similarly Hawking’s singularity enhanced his ranking. But dissimilarly Hawking has produced no follow-up distinguished enough to elevate him over many others now living. It will take much more to win a first place designation for Hawking, or even to solidify a position in the top 10. Quantum Gravity does not qualify because the theory is so far from complete that no contributor’s work can yet be properly evaluated.
The greatest crisis of all time? Greater than the precession of Mercury? Greater than the lumineferous ether? Greater than the ongoing tension between Relativity and QM? GR bible or no GR bible I believe Wheeler has been misquoted.
My error re GR solutions, but that does not diminish the comparative importance of GADP’s discovery of the MB (I do not think Wilson and Penzias deserve to be considered co-discoverers since if left along they might have gone on thinking that the static they saw was caused by pigeon shit).
The continuing proliferation of different approaches only confirms that Quantum gravity theory is so far from complete that no contributor’s work can yet be properly evaluated.
I agree completely, but I have not tried to do that. My argument has only ever been is that Hawking’s achievements are sufficient that attempting to rank living physicists above him invloves a very high degree of subjectivity.
I like the way you accuse me of making an ad hominem attack, before making one of your own in the same sentence. My point is though that Hawking’s work on singularities should be a basic reference point when discussing his achievements, so demonstrating an awareness and basic understanding of it is surely necessary to evaluate his work.
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I don’t think you’ve chosen a particularly good analogy, however the point is Hawking did follow it up with other work, most importantly Hawking radiation. To say it some how doesn’t count because it is in the broad umbrella of quantum gravity is to misunderstand how the result was arrived at. Hawking has shown that hawking radiation is a result in Euclidean quantum gravity (an approach which extends Feynman’s path integral approach to quantum field theory), it was actually derived using a semi-classical approximation. To compare, the approximate energy levels of a hydrogen atom were derived using a semi-classical approximation long before quantum electrodynamics was formulated.
Considering Wheeler is one of the co-authors of the book and who was responsible for the chapter in question I highly doubt that Wheeler misquoted himself.
Obviously its is important in physical cosmology (depending on how you view the fact it was a re-derivation of an older piece of work) , but the point is in GR not so much. Sure it provides an important way of experimentally testing GR, but it didn’t push the understanding of the whole theory forward like Hawking.