This made me think of this story I once read (in Hyam’s Zen in the Martial Arts):
"King Hsuan of Chou heard of Po Kung-i, who was reputed to be the strongest man in his kingdom. The king was dismayed when they met, since Po looked so weak. When the King asked Po how strong he was, Po said mildly, “I can break the leg of a spring grasshopper and withstand the winds of an autumn cicada.” Aghast, the King thundered, “I can tear rhinoceros leather and drag nine buffaloes by the tail, yet I am shamed by my weakness. How can you be famous?” Po smiled and answered quietly, “My teacher was Tzu Shang-chi’ui, whose strength was without peer in the world, but even his relatives never knew it because he never used it.”
I’m going to postulate I’m the smartest person my friends have met, but I never use it.
NdG is clearly a media personality with a small sideline as an academic. His career has been mainly focused on promoting science to the public and, because he has been very successful at this and has gained a large public profile, many assume has made significant academic contributions, when in reality his name has only been on 13 published papers in the last 30 years, most of which he was one of many contributors and hasn’t really made any significant contributions to the field.
On the other sometimes the sword cuts both ways. The fact that Stephen Hawking has such a high media personality can obscure the fact that Stephen Hawking is indisputably one of the greatest living theoretical physicists who’s made major contributions to his field.
I would disagree (though I would prefer to talk about the signifcance of their contributions than the nebulous concept of smartness"). Usually it is very difficult to compare physicists directly, but Hawking and Thorne have worked in very similar fields in a very similar time frame (there is less than 6 months difference in their age) and I think it is difficult to compare the two’s contributions without Hawking coming out on top.
I just tried to find a list of the greatest physicists alive today. I found several of them, and they are quite inconsistent. Is Hawking one of the 20 best physicists alive today? Yes. Is he one of the 30 smartest people alive today? That’s a lot harder to evaluate. There are a lot of fields out there, and it’s hard to compare them.
I was basing that mostly on the fact that, on every point of physics where they’ve disagreed which has subsequently been resolved, it’s been Thorne who turned out to be right.
Of course, when speaking of “the smartest people alive”, or some such, one must also distinguish whether one means “Of people alive right now, who has been the smartest”, vs. “Who is currently smartest”. Most of Hawking’s greatest work, for instance, was done decades ago, and his present output is far inferior. Do we rank him based on his peak, or on his present value?
Not really to argue, but NdG’s greatest contribution may be his media presence. Inspiration to others - making science and physics “cool”. Getting the thoughts and ideas out to the public/especially the younger audience in an understandable form could be counted as “genius”. Communication skills are underrated.
I think my point is that with Stephen Hawking people tend to assume that his reputation is mostly undeserved because of his huge media profile, but don’t be fooled he genuinely is someone who reached the pinnacle of his field and was known for his particular brilliance.
And don’t forget that Hawking pretty much has to absorb, memorize and internalize virtually all of the information he receives as he lacks the ability to go back and re-read or browse through material after the fact like most of us can. He does have assistants who can do research or find specific items he may want to know more about or revisit, but asking them to do so through his computerized communication system would be a long and laborious process, and quite impractical in terms of going back through certain items in material previously covered.
Then, and only then, can he perform the mental gymnastics required to take the facts and other information he’s been exposed to and develop them into the complex calculations and theories he arrives at. Sort of like playing a game of chess in your head, with no board and no pieces and keeping track of every move and each piece’s current location solely in your mind, only considerably more complex and difficult even than that.
> I think my point is that with Stephen Hawking people tend to assume that his
> reputation is mostly undeserved because of his huge media profile, but don’t be
> fooled he genuinely is someone who reached the pinnacle of his field and was
> known for his particular brilliance.
I don’t think that the average person today who’s heard of Stephen Hawking thinks that his reputation is undeserved. I think that they overrate him. By “average person,” I mean all those who know his name, which includes people who know little of what physics is about. Someone who has seen the Star Trek episode with him, Einstein, Newton, and Data playing poker could easily get the idea that his achievements are on the level of Einstein or Newton. They aren’t. He may be one of the 20 best physicists alive, but he’s not the best.
“The greatest military genius our world ever produced was a brick-layer from somewhere back of Boston—died during the Revolution—by the name of Absalom Jones. Wherever he goes, crowds flock to see him. You see, everybody knows that if he had had a chance he would have shown the world some generalship that would have made all generalship before look like child’s play and ’prentice work. But he never got a chance; he tried heaps of times to enlist as a private, but he had lost both thumbs and a couple of front teeth, and the recruiting sergeant wouldn’t pass him. However, as I say, everybody knows, now, what he would have been,—and so they flock by the million to get a glimpse of him whenever they hear he is going to be anywhere. Cæsar, and Hannibal, and Alexander, and Napoleon are all on his staff, and ever so many more great generals; but the public hardly care to look at them when he is around.”
Subtle point, here: On the one hand, Hawking really is quite a brilliant man, and deserves a reputation as such. On the other hand, the reputation he has is mostly due to his health conditions, and not due to anything he’s earned. People should know him because he’s brilliant, but they do actually know him because he’s in a wheelchair and talks through a machine. This is illustrated by the fact that most people don’t know of many physicists smarter yet than him, but who didn’t have a wheelchair to make them stand out: Far more people know of Hawking than Feynman (who is unfortunately disqualified from ___est person alive, but was probably the greatest physicist since Einstein), for instance.
(1) being one of Einstein’s college math teachers
(2) calling Einstein a “lazy dog” who did not care for mathematics
(3) providing the 4-dimensional mathematical (Riemannian) framework for Special Relativity (Einstein quipped that he did not recognize his own theory since the mathematicians had gotten ahold of it)
(4) Recognizing that space and time form a continuum, and coining the term “Spacetime” to name it.
But this is the first I have heard that Minkowski or anyone else was “hot on the tail of SR”, and I believe GR required much more advanced math than Riemann. The mathematician Poincare recognized that time might be a constant of nature, but neither he nor anyone else appears to have been on the verge of making the final key step which entailed recognizing that an event could not appear simultaneous to observers in different frames of reference (I think that is right- subject to correction by someone better versed).
The discovery of Quantum matrix mechanics (by Heisenberg on the island of Heligoland, where he had gone to seek refuge from an allergy attack in the sea air) can be established essentially to the day, sometime in June 1925. His postdoc supervisor Max Born (who recognized that QM could mathematically described by using matrices) and another postdoc named Pascal Jordan helped him develop the initial insight, with contributions by mail from Englishman Paul Dirac. Likewise Schroedinger’s wave mechanics can be precisely dated to a winter (I think Jan&ff 1926) vacation in an Alpine resort. (During this creative outburst Schroedinger left his poor wife at home, and kept company with a still unidentified lady friend).
Einstein famously rejected QM as being fundamental, and made no contributions to its development, unless thought experiments such as Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen can be considered a sort of infidirect contribution, keeping the true believers on their toes if nothing else.
I just feel Hawking is being damned a little with faint praise here. Talking about the “best physicist” alive today clearly involves comparing physicists who worked in a variety of fields and who were most active at different times. However ignoring his media profile, ignoring his struggles with disability, he genuinely is one of the most significant figures in late twentieth century theoretical physics and even beyond this his work is characterized by a particular brilliance.
In 1905 alone Einstein contributed seminal papers on:
(1) Special Relativity
(2) The Photoelectric Effect
(3) Brownian Motion
All of which had far-ranging effects, and all of which have won permanent place in the intellectual history of human beings. Further contributions were made in Relativity and Quantum Theory (although not Quantum Mechanics).
Now is the time to spell out exactly what work of particular brilliance places Hawking within sight of the place assigned to Einstein.
Basically Minkowski, who also happened to be one of Einstein’s teachers (I can’t comment on the veracity of your quotes), provided a further level of abstraction to special relativity by pointing out that it could be put into a geometric context in a 4D pseudo-Euclidean space. This was of course done after Einstein had formulated SR. However this proved key in that Einstein realized that by using the techniques that Riemann used to expand the subject of analytic geometry of Euclidean spaces to Riemannian geometry, he could create a relativistic theory of gravity GR.
Minkowski wasn’t as far as I’m aware on the verge of discovering SR before Einstein, but it is clear that others (particularly Poincare and Lorentz) were. In many ways all Einstein did was to put the ideas of Lorentz and Poincare into a more elegant form. Riemannian geometry if you like is the subset of pseudo-Riemannian geometry where the metric signature is limited to (n,0) and the mathematics of GR is largely the subset of pseudo-Riemannian geometry where the signature is limited to (3,1) so it uses almost identical mathematical tools
The revolution brought about in the development of quantum physics by Heisenberg and Schroedinger usually leads to what had gone before to be termed “the old quantum theory” as opposed to the new quantum mechanics of Schroedinger and Heisenberg.
Einstein made several important contributions to QM. Firstly he did a number of pieces of work in the area of the old quantum theory (most famously on the photoelectric effect) that were to become key motivators to quantum mechanics, secondly he translated and expanded Bose’s work on quantum statistics (Bose-Einstein statistics), thirdly his debates with the leading proponents of quantum mechanics stimulated the development of the theory. The EPR paradox may’ve been intended to discredit quantum mechanics, but it actually was the first time the concept of quantum entanglement was recognized.
What about Dr. Sheldon “Shellie” Cooper, PhD, PhD? He earned two PhDs by the time he was 18, theoretically discovered a new super-heavy element, concluded string theory was crap, developed “The Roommate Agreement” (diversity) and has kissed Dr. Amy Farah-Fowler, and is the most annoying man on television.
Yeah, Einstein didn’t have nearly the impact on quantum mechanics that Heisenberg or Schrödinger did, but he definitely made important contributions to it. Heck, his Nobel Prize was for (very preliminary) work in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics was the product of a great many brilliant minds, first among them Heisenberg and Schrödinger, but also including (in no particular order) Einstein, Planck, de Broglie, Fermi, Dirac, Pauli, Bose, and probably a couple more I’m not remembering. This is in contrast to, say, general relativity, which really was for the most part the creation of a single man.
Chronos: how many decades to get to general relativity if Big Al had dropped dead on Jan 1, 1906 and done no further work on it, including calling attention to special relativity?
Special relativity was a huge leap. But to take that as a starting point to then reach general relativity seems to me to take such an extraordinary vision of the universe that it might have been a quarter to half a century ahead of its time. Not so with the laws of motion, optics or calculus, all of which were on the verge of being discovered.
From my point of view, Newton was by far the best mind of his time, and saw clearly what others were struggling to comprehend, and sometimes they were succeeding. But general relativity by 1915 is, in my opinion, the equivalent of describing a vision of a fifth of God’s physics workshop. The man’s theory predicted frickin’ frame dragging that has only 100 years later been proven to happen exactly as predicted by the theory.
Quantum theory existed when AE published his 1905 photoelectric paper and won his 1921 Nobel Prize, but quantum mechanics did not exist, and would not exist until Heisenberg’s discovery on Helgoland in 6/25. Quantum mechanics began on that specific date.
