He’s a brilliant man, no question - but is he really the ‘successor to Einstein’?
And isn’t he something of a shameless self-promoter? For example, when he guested on The Simpsons, he was introduced as ‘Stephen Hawking, the World’s smartest man’. I understand the heavily ironic content of The Simpsons (duh!) - but it still left a nasty taste in the mouth.
pukey
I think he’s brighter than Einstein. What did Einstein contribute after his two relativity theories? Einstein never adopted quantum mechanics and could not believe it was possible. Einstein added a fudge factor to make his equations equal what he perceived as reality; then changed his mind. Sure, Einstein was a factor in our developing the A-bomb, but that was based on work he did much earlier in his life. In later years, he contributed nothing. Whereas, Hawking, a physical cripple (nothing more than a mind, mind you) continues with his thought-provoking ideas.
I don’t think Hawking is a self-promotor. Is he responsible for how others introduce him?
Hawking is definitely a brilliant scientist. Smarter than Einstein? Maybe but Einstein provided a single, grand leap in knowledge that is the basis for most of the work done today. Since then his theories have been refined and expanded upon but that doesn’t make Einstein’s contribution to science any less compelling.
Personally I think Hawking is especially notable for two reasons:
Working through his handicap is nothing short of amazing. By all rights the man should be long dead (and by that I mean that most people with his disease do not last nearly as long as he has). Luck? Force of will? Who knows? Whatever the case I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who has contributed so much while being saddled with such a thoroughly debilitating disease.
I believe he picked up the gauntlet left by Carl Sagan. I don’t see a shameless self-promoter. I see a man who has tried to bring science to the masses. He has attempted to give the average man a glimpse into the thoroughly weird world of quantum mechanics, black holes, time, etc… For his attempts at fighting ignorance he has my hearty approval (as if he needed it).
Wasn’t Einstein instrumental in the development of QM? After all, he won his Nobel prize for his groundbreaking paper on the photoelectric effect.
If you are referring to the cosmologcal constant, hasn’t that ‘fudge’ recently been revived?
Wasn’t he simply too far ahead to his time? He spent much of his later time searching for today’s goal - the GUT.
I agree- the man is incredibly brave and his accomplishments are far more impressive in light of his disability. But what does that hae to do with the relative importance of his work?
I agree that Hawking radiation was new and profound, but I understand that much of his work is evolutionary, not revolutionary (ugh, cliche alert!)
Perhaps, but a few seconds later he claims an IQ over 250 (I can’t remember the exact figure).
pukey
Yes, but then he dissassociated himself from QM, and said, “God does not play dice with the Universe.”
Yes, but that has nothing to do with Einstein’s changing his mind. Moreover, that is still a tenuous theory.
Is it self-promotion to tell the truth when asked?
That explanation drew on Planck’s earlier work on cavity radiation. I don’t believe that Einstein contributed a great deal towards modern QM (most of the mathematical foundations were developed by others, like Hilbert, Heisenberg, &c). However…
Well, he spent a lot of time looking for the GUT, as was mentioned. But you also need to remember his explanation of Brownian motion and his contributions to statistical mechanics, before he worked out special relativity. Further, his objections to QM were mostly philosophical. I seem to recall that he acknowledged the mathematical success of QM despite disagreeing with the philosophical interpetation, which hardly detracts from his status as a scientist.
Quite true. Inserting the cosmological constant was, as Einstein acknowledged, not the best move he ever made.
In fact, I believe that most cosmologists think that there is a cosmological constant, and it’s not insignificant. Indeed, a large area of ongoing research now is to predict what the cosmological constant ought to be. (People are getting it VERY wrong, but that’s another story.)
My personal belief? Hawking has done a lot, and it’s all the more impressive because of his disability; it’s this that has brought him his recognition. Is he the greatest scientist since Einstein? I doubt it, but he’s certainly a very important figure in modern physics.
I wonder how much he’d have contributed were he not disabled: on the one hand, he’d have other things he could do, but on the other, it’s not like he currently has the ability to work his equations out on a chalkboard, and from the one time I heard him “speak,” he doesn’t exactly come up with new sentences all that quickly (as you might expect), so even having someone else write for him or something must be slow.
There really is no definite answer to this, and I won’t even attempt to examine the relative brilliance of two men who are way beyond myself, but to address a few things that were said…
Einstein may be (justly) famous for SR and GR, but his influence in physics went far beyond those areas. How about his theory of the photoelectric effect, dramatically extending Planck’s first concept of quantization? Theory of Brownian motion (proof of the existence of atoms)? Einstein solids? Bose-Einstein statistics? There are few if any areas of physics that Einstein did not touch at some point in his career.
Besides, say Al’s contributions to physics had been limited to SR and GR. Those alone are more than enough to secure his legacy among the most brilliant of physicists. While the math of these theories was fairly well-established, it was a fantastic leap to apply it to the physical world as Einstein did. While I think it’s fairly certain that someone else would have figured out SR fairly soon if Einstein hadn’t (the effects–or not–of Lorentz transforms in E&M was hard to ignore), I have always heard doubts (including quotes from some pretty famous physicists) as to whether anyone else would have discovered GR for a good while. The ideas behind general relativity are truly revolutionary and non-intuitive.
Hawking, by contrast, has always worked within the pre-existing frameworks of GR and quantum mechanics (and at the quasi-borders of the two). Yes, he’s done brilliant work, but it’s far from the same thing as coming up with something like GR on one’s own.
It’s been mentioned in another current thread that Einstein did indeed “accept” quantum mechanics. I’ve never been sure quite to what degree he cozied up to the ideas of QM before he died, and since it’s such an attractive thing to make “look at Einstein–so smart but couldn’t accept the truth” stories, I’m not too trusting of most things I hear.
However, Einstein did lay the first brick in quantum theory with his theory of the photoelectric effect. Certainly I don’t see how he could have argued with the “correctness” of QM, at least as far as its experimental success; by the time he died it had been spectacularly well-confirmed. Whether he agreed with some of the supposed philosophical ramifications is one thing, but I doubt Einstein simply dismissed QM as “wrong”.
The equations of GR allow for such a factor; they also allow for it not to exist. In fact, they allow an awful lot of different scenarios for the structure and evolution for the universe, and only one can be correct. At the time Einstein first started publishing on GR it was pretty much universally thought that the universe was static, so he modified his equations to fit the observational “fact”. Theories have to match experiment, or else they aren’t much good.
I’d say when you can publish three Nobel-worthy items in the space of a year, you can afford to kick back for a while afterwards.
But Einstein didn’t. He was working on his own verion of a unified theory pretty much up until his death. No, he didn’t succeed, but neither have any of the many other people who have been trying for a few decades.
And a few more that have appeared as I wrote this…
Again, this is an issue with his opinions of interpretation, not correctness.
Again, Einstein “changed his mind” because the observational evidence changed. And, incidentally, the evidence for the existence of a cosmological constant is now quite strong.
It’s all good revisionism and all to knock Einstein, but personally I think his influence in physics is, if anything, understated.
Anyway, I have no credentials to comment on the intelligence of Hawking, but I’ve never been too excited by his “popularizations”. A Brief History of Time has shown up on a lot of bookshelves and coffee tables, but out of the many people I’ve known who have bought the book, relatively few have made any serious attempt to read it and fewer still seem to have gotten much out of it. Certainly, though, his success in spite of his disease is amazing, especially given that he was only given a couple of years to live back when he was in graduate school!
I have to respectfully disagree with Whack-a-Mole on
To me, what Sagan managed to do, that no one else (except maybe Isaac Asimov) has, is to convey a simple sense of wonder at the world explored by science. I guess I’ve gotten to the point in my academic training where I’m no longer satisfied with the hand-waving in “popular science” books by people like Hawking, Thorne, and Greene (show me some equations, even if I can’t understand 'em!); but I can still pick up Cosmos and get absorbed in reading about the science of the ancient Greeks or the landscape on another planet or Carl’s musing on extraterrestrial life. To me, Sagan still stands head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd of writers on science for both the mass audience and for scientists themselves.
Hardly a GQ-type answer, eh?
From the perspective of his reputation amongst British physicists, he’s regarded as as important as anybody else on the scene and one tough cookie. Certainly by far the most obvious candidate for the Lucasian professorship. And most would settle for that as a reputation.
No professional theoretical physicist would regard “the smartest guy since Einstein” or anything similar as remotely a sensible statement. It can just about be agreed that there’s a top league comprising Newton, Maxwell and Einstein and that’s about it. Ed Witten’s role in bringing mathematics and physics together is probably more unparalleled than anything Hawking’s done.
Regarding self-promotion, Hawking has always been up-front about writing A Brief History of Time in order to make money. I don’t think any of his professional colleagues resent that. Few, if any, would swap.
Bose-Einstein statistics ? Spontaneous transitions ? Even the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper arguing against quantum mechanics was worthwhile in sharpening a debate that had interesting consequences decades down the line.
Einstein was neither instrumental in starting the Manhatten Project (the Frisch-Peierls memorandum made that inevitable independent of the Einstein-Szilard-Teller letter), nor was the result especially based on his work. The latter issue is discussed at length in Friedman and Donley’s Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge, 1985).
I respect Hawking’s work and personal bravery, but it is in no way anywhere near as revolutionary as Einstein’s. At best, Hawking is an interior decorator making renovations to the house Einstein built. Albiet important renovations.
The only thing that comes close is quantum mechanics. The reason both are considered such dramatic acheivements is that they are anything but obvious. A fellow named Poincaire came up with the mathematics for the special theory of relativity about the same time Einstein did, but there is little indication if any that he used it to explain space/time as Einstein did. Einstein took a number of unexplained observations made by other scientists over several decades, reconciled them in his head, came up with a proposed solution, then set a number of proposed tests for his solutions (progression of Mercury’s orbit, bending of light around gravitational source, etc.) to prove them, all without any experiment to back it up, and then all proved to be true. Even Planck, Bohr and Heisenberg, the “father’s” of quantum mechanics, which is far weirder than relativity did their work in a lab and can’t claim such singlehanded mastery of their field and scientific advancement. Even Newton, an all time giant of a physics thinker (gravity, optics, calculus etc.), can’t lay claim to anything like the twin tours de force of special and general relativity. The above dis of Big Al is just inexcusable.
As for the fact that Einstein made mistakes, all that proves is that he wasn’t Jesus Christ. The leaps of reasoning ability to come to the theories of relativity might have left mere mortal physicists concluding that Big Al was the second coming if it hadn’t been for his mistakes.
As far as Einstein’s contributions to the A-bomb, they included signing a letter to Roosevelt stating that Hitler was working on it, it was feasible and the amount of energy released would E=MCC (don’t know how to do squared). The nitty-gritty work was more quantum mechanics, which was not Einstein’s baliwick.
You’ve got to be kidding. His appearance on The Simpsons simply showed that he has a great sense of humor. Compared to anyone in Springfield hs is the world’s smartest man!
DPWhite - Press 0178 on the keypad while holding down the ALT key: E=mc²
Try E=MC[supra]2[/supra}. See if that works.
Well, it didn’t. Try E=MC [sup] 2 [/sup].
In the play Insignificance (which I hear is also a film, but I never saw it) it is suggested that Einstein spends the last few years of his life repeadedly completing the GUT, burning it and then figuring it out again because he’s so bored.
Not saying it’s true, but somehow I could see Al doing that.
Being a fairly old gent, I have heard about Einstein all my life. To me one of the amazing facts is that from time to time during my life I’ve heard that scientists had finally tested this or that about what Einstein said. Einstein laid down the theories and had to wait years for them to be proven. So what if one of his theories seemed wrong at first and then has come back simply because we are unable to test his theories when he first made them? We will never know what he could have accomplished if he knew for sure that he’d been right shortly after he developed a theory.
Dagnabbit, pcubed, ya beat me to it!
::stalks off, muttering::
Blah! Blah! Blah! I read “A Brief History of Time.” Of course, I read the illustrated version. It was amazing how Mr. Hawkings put unbelievably complex stuff into relative laymans terms (I have a BBA). Do get the illustrated version, which has pic. models of what he is saying.
Shameless self promoter? No way. Self promoter? Sure.
This being somewhat of a matter of opinion, I’m going to shoot it over to IMHO.