Stephen Hawking - overrated?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Within the scientific community, Dr. Hawking is hardly overrated. He is accorded the honor and respect he deserves Of course, he’s not without critics (no serious scientist is), but he’s justly admired in most scientific circles.

I suspect that the OP’s real point was this: Dr. Hawking has become a celebrity, as few other scientists ever have. Only Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan have achieved comparable fame among the general public. And the celebrity status they’ve achieved has very little to do with the importance of their work. 90% of Americans couldn’t tell you who Max Planck was, but they ALL know Einstein’s name (and probably use the name “Einstein” to refer to ANYONE who’s perceived as a genius). 99% of Americans wouldn’t recognize Steven Weinberg’s name (though he’s a Nobel-winning physicist), but everybody knows who Stephen Hawking is. And yet, most people know little about Einstein’s work (“Um… he said e = mc squared, right? Um… no, I don’t really know what it means, but he made the atom bomb, right?”), and less about Hawking’s (“Yeah, he’s the dude in the wheelchair who talks on a computer… he’s WILD, man! He’s like a sci-fi character. Uh… yeah, I bought his book about time. I read a few pages, but I didn’t really understand it.”)

To suggest that Hawking is “overrated” is NOT to insult him or belittle him, or to question his brilliance. But it IS fair to ask, why is he a pop icon? Why is HE featured on “Star Trek” or “The Simpsons,” and not Professor Weinberg?

Sad to say, Hawking’s illness is probably a BIG part of what makes him famous. In our “Oprah”-ized culture, his handicap is seen as making him more fascinating. If he were perfectly healthy, and could walk and speak like anyone else, he’d STILL be one of the world’s greatest minds, and would STILL be highly esteemed within the scientific community. But outside the scientific community, he’d be an unknown, just as MOST top physicists are.

But of course, this sad truth reflects badly on our culture, NOT on Dr. Hawking.

22

Einstein vs. Hawking can only be decided by Celebrity Deathmatch.

23

Never mind Hawking (who I do think is up there with Einstein); how the hell does Sagan keep getting interjected into this conversation? “billions and billions” indeed.

24

Einstein did accept the science of Quantum Mechanics. What he did not accept was certain philosophical interpretations of those findings. His full quote, which nobody ever seems to remember, is “God is subtle, but not malicious. He may sometimes deal the cards where they can’t be seen, but I cannot believe that He would play dice with the world.”. Quantum mechanics can be consistently interpreted as meaning that some things are unmeasureable, or that the Universe is non-deterministic. Either interpretation is possible, and Einstein was just stating which interpretation he preferred.

Hawking is certainly smart, but that’s not why he’s so famous. He’s famous because he’s a pretty good popularizer, and many smart scientists don’t even bother trying to explain their work to laymen. If you ask me, I’d say that the smartest physicist currently living is probably either Thorne (but then, I’m biased, being a relativist) or Gell-man. I’d also say that probably neither one of them is as smart as Einstein, but then again, Al is a hard act to follow. Maybe Kip Thorne, say, would have discovered GR, had Einstein not beat him to it.

25

A interesting way to compare the two might to judge how a big a leap of understanding the universe they contibuted to mankind.

The leap from pre-relativity to relativity, IMHO, in perhaps the biggest, and most non-intuitive, leap ever made. How Einstein figured this stuff out, through only mind experiments, is completely and utterly beyond my understanding. It’s almost as if he was an alien, or from the future or something.

I don’t think Hawking (or anybody else) has made a comparitive leap.

It seems like most theories, as they have been made over years, have been logical extensions of what is known at the time, and would have been discovered by somebody around that time. I think relativity is an exception. If Einstein hadn’t come up with it, it’s possible it would have taken another fifty years until someone had figured it out, from experimental data.