I largely, but not entirely, agree with Stranger. I especially agree about the relative importance of Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis. I think he is correct about special relativity although Einstein was the first to claim these phenomena were real, rather than just equations that worked. Time an space really dilated in a frame moving with respect to the observer; it was not just appearance. I disagree about general relativity. While Hilbert was, in point of fact, first (by a matter of days) in getting the equations right, it was only after interaction with Einstein and the fundamental ideas were Einstein’s. General relativity was a startling new idea and they are truly rare. The basic mathematics was not Hilbert’s either but the end of a line of (“abstract”, “useless”, “never-bought-any-groceries”) developments that started with Gauss, were intensively studied by Riemann and explained to Einstein by Minkowski.
As for the OP, in my opinion Hawking will go down as one of the ten most important physicists of the 20th century. but not near the top of that list. But, as Mao is reported to have said when asked whether all-in-all the French revolution was positive or negative, it is too soon to tell.
What’s really impressive to me is that Hawking, being unable to turn pages and make notes, has to first memorize and absorb the data he encounters while doing his research, then analyze that and regurgitate it in the form of the theories he proposes and the discoveries that he makes.
I know that he has assistants to help him in this regard, but they can’t really be all that much help when you consider the difficulty presented in trying to convey to them, via that incredibly slow voice machine, what he needs and where to find it.
I’d still guess that 99% of his knowledge is from information retained upon first reading and recalled as needed, and then transformed into the calculations and theories that he creates and then has to work on and adjust as he goes forward.
To me, these are the things that are most impressive about Stephen Hawking.
The thing about Einstein was that eccentric hairdo, too. I wonder if he’d be as famous if he looked, and acted like a conservative IBM drone. Hawking doesn’t have much choice but to be that wheelchair guy, but Einstein could have gotten a haircut and a comb, the big drama queen attention whore.
When he was at the Institute of Advanced Physics he often walked around the town of Princeton, sometimes in the company of his physicist friends. Although people didn’t harass him in the modern sense, they often stopped to talk or ask questions.
At one point, Einstein sighed and said to his friend, “I’d do anything to stop these disturbances to my thoughts.”
Very high intelligence is not easily quantifiable; certainly not quantifiable enough to create a linear scale which has a single Top Quark. The notion that there is a “World’s Smartest Human” itself betrays an ignorance about the nature of intelligence.
Stranger’s comments are spot on for three of the problems: Who gets to decide (it’s certainly not a popular vote with Paris Hilton also getting one vote), what happens if a putatively brilliant hypothesis is not testable, and what happens if a theorist (Huygens, e.g.*) influential in his time turns out to have been wrong?
But the Most Brilliant title should not necessarily go to the one who ends up being right, either. Surely among the components of intelligence is the ability not just to assimilate and analyze current thinking, but to create new paradigms. And the test for brilliance of the proposed paradigm shift is not simply whether or not it turns out to be correct. A weak theorist can still luck into a strong theory; an entire classical physics paradigm may miss relativistic subtleties but nevertheless reflect a powerful genius.
*I am still betting on Huygens in the sense that space (whatever the matrix is in which gravitational and EM fields exist) may be said to be an aether. The resolution of quantum physics and general relativity is going to be an understanding of Space and a conceptual reinstatement of What Aether Really Is. And of course if I’m right it won’t be a triumph of brilliance–it will be the Luck of the Dullard. But Huygens was right, dammit: Light cannot propagate in nothing. And empty space is not nothing. Fields and particles don’t move in space. They are space, moving.
I always thought Schrodinger was best known for the Cat that existed and didn’t exist at the same time (Schrodinger’s Cat). That’s certainly how he’s known in Pop Culture, at any rate…
This is true, but that’s not what most people associate Schrodinger’s name with. We know it’s the whole Wave/Particle thing, most people just remember something about a cat that manages to be alive and dead at the same time without being a Vampire Cat or something equally silly. The fact that the cat was just a way to Schrodinger to get his point across is, I think, lost on most people.
Hawking’s reputation is exactly what it should be in the Science world. He’s highly honored, but not unduly honored, there.
The OP’s complaint is really with pop culture. I mean, we have a Nobel-winning physicist here in Austin, but I’d guess 99% of Austinites have no clue who Steven Weinberg is. He doesn’t get invited to appear on “Star Trek” or to do guest vocals with Pink Floyd.
Even Dr. Hawking would surely admit that, in the world at large, he’s famous less for his work (which very few people could understand or describe) than for his appearance and his affliction, which has made brought him numerous opporunities to appaear in pop culture.
But he’s hardly unique in that regard. Ask an average person to name a modern astronomer, and he’ll name Carl Sagan. But very few people could name a second astronomer, and few could tell you exactly what Sagan did besides hosting “Cosmos” and writing “Contact.” Sagan’s reputation among his peers was just as it should have been- but it was grossly inflated among the general public, who regarded him as a genius, even if they didn’t really know what his discoveries or accomplishments were.
One important thing: someone said something about other people not “asking” non-disabled experts to write popular books–for most of them, I don’t think it is that they are not asked, it’s that they aren’t interested. I think any really world-class scientist could probably find a publisher willing to give them a shot at a popular book, but that’s not what they really want to do with their time.
I can attest to the whole popularity thing. I wouldnt have picked up a physics book to save my life, but after appearing on the Colbert Report, I bought and read Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s “Death by Black Hole”. It was fun, interesting, and most importantly, very understandable. Though I dont know how venerable he is within the scientific community, I can say that he’s more personable and funnier than most of them
You might want to do an internet search on a guy that calls himself Uncle Al.
Very bright, funny, and ungodly politically incorrect guy.
A few years ago he was getting some pretty smart folks to check out something experimentally about space (empty)? having a preferred spin/twist? to it.
Given your interest in non-empty space, you might find something interesting…or at least someone smarter to about with than me
He totally lost me too, Sigene, within 50 pages easily. But I read to the end with pleasure because of the beauty and clarity of his prose. I could tell he was explaining the phenomena elegantly and probably as simply as possible. It was just way over my head. But I may be one of those you refer to who speak well of the book and recommend it without having understood it themselves.
As I remember, the book begins with synopses of some of the great scientists and milestones in scientific history leading to our current understanding. I have never before or since read such succinct yet enlightening profiles. By the time he totally lost me - in explanations of various cosmological events and forces - I knew it was my fault, not his. The man writes well.
I’d take issue with this. I’ve read, and enjoyed many modern physics books, but I found ‘A Brief History…’ to be, frankly, boring. I don’t think he writes well at all. I prefer authors like Brian Greene, Jim al-Khalili and Marcus Chown. They engaged me in the subject far more than Hawking.
Brian Greene is writing about a subject that is easily understood, despite being terribly abstract. The idea that everything is made out of loops of “string” that vibrate is something anybody can picture in their head.
Is the same true for Hawking’s material?
I’m guessing the majority of the people who claim Greene elucidated the material better than Hawking are unable to provide an overview of Greene’s explanation of the Yang-Mills stuff, and instead focus on the easily digested, and pictured, little loops of vibrating string.
