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A review by kevin_shepherd
Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by Charles Seife
5.0
Judging by the title, I half expected this to be some sort of tabloid takedown of Hawking’s legitimacy as a relevant and important cosmologist. I was wrong. If anything, Hawking Hawking is a biographical celebration of one of the most recognizable scientists of the 20th Century.
“…the vast majority of people who admired Hawking knew little about what he had done to deserve his reputation.” (pg 4)
Hawking’s Big Three
1. As a physicist, Hawking’s scientific legacy really began with his PhD thesis. Here he showed that the universe, in Big Bang theorem, had to have been birthed from “an infinitesimal but infinite blemish on the fabric of space and time.” A singularity. A place where all our mathematics go completely to shit.
2. Singularity aside, Hawking thought his biggest cosmological breakthrough came in the form of his quantum-mechanical calculations of universal wave-functions. This was the point in Hawking’s life where physicists cheered and theologians jeered; the point when Hawking took God and his necessity out of the equation. After Hawking successfully conceptualized a starting point for all space and time, “what place, then, for a creator?”
3. Be that as it may, the consensus among his peers is that Hawking’s biggest contribution to science was neither his singularity theorem nor his cosmological wave-functions; his most impactful breakthrough was his discovery of what is now known as “Hawking radiation” - a discovery that upended black hole cosmology and forever changed the applications of both quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity.
[spoilers removed]
“Hawking laid the foundations, and one after another his compatriots built an edifice upon them.” ~Kip Thorne, theoretical physicist, 2003
*Science Popularizer: (also known as science ambassadors) any person who attempts to help the public understand how science works, the findings of science, and how science relates to public policy; an interpreter of science for general audiences. Science popularizers may be scientists themselves or they may also be professional science journalists.
With the publication of his book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Hawking transitioned from relevant scientist to phenomenal celebrity. A transition that was exponentially magnified by Hawking’s degenerative disability, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
It is here, in Hawking’s dichotomy of scientist versus celebrity, where author Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking sinks its proverbial teeth. Seife draws a stark contrast between public perception and reality. Not since Albert Einstein had anyone captured the world’s collective imagination the way Stephen Hawking did. And, much like Einstein, Hawking’s popularity overshadowed contemporaries of equal (or perhaps even greater) scientific importance.
“To compare Hawking to Newton or Einstein is just nonsense. There is no physicist alive who compares to Einstein or Bohr in ability. But those rather grottily researched little biographies of Galileo and Newton in A Brief History do rather invite you to put Hawking in that same sequence. In a list of the 12 best theoretical physicists this century Steve would be nowhere near.” ~John Barrow, theoretical physicist, 1992
This echoes a recollection Neil deGrasse Tyson, himself an astrophysicist and science popularizer, had of a physics conference in 1991:
“We all agreed that [Stephen Hawking] is a pretty smart guy, and that he is an excellent physicist. But we further agreed that he falls below a dozen other physicists from the twentieth century, most of whom the public has never heard of.” ~NdT (The Sky Is Not the Limit, pg 131)
Wherever one ranks Stephen Hawking on the 20th century’s cosmological scale of relevance, it was not Bohr or de Broglie or Dirac or Eddington or Fermi or Heisenberg or Planck or whomever that brought theoretical physics into the limelight of public consciousness, it was Stephen.
“Have you heard? Have you heard what Stephen has discovered? Everything is different. Everything is changed!” ~Martin Rees, cosmologist and astrophysicist, 1974
“…the vast majority of people who admired Hawking knew little about what he had done to deserve his reputation.” (pg 4)
Hawking’s Big Three
1. As a physicist, Hawking’s scientific legacy really began with his PhD thesis. Here he showed that the universe, in Big Bang theorem, had to have been birthed from “an infinitesimal but infinite blemish on the fabric of space and time.” A singularity. A place where all our mathematics go completely to shit.
2. Singularity aside, Hawking thought his biggest cosmological breakthrough came in the form of his quantum-mechanical calculations of universal wave-functions. This was the point in Hawking’s life where physicists cheered and theologians jeered; the point when Hawking took God and his necessity out of the equation. After Hawking successfully conceptualized a starting point for all space and time, “what place, then, for a creator?”
3. Be that as it may, the consensus among his peers is that Hawking’s biggest contribution to science was neither his singularity theorem nor his cosmological wave-functions; his most impactful breakthrough was his discovery of what is now known as “Hawking radiation” - a discovery that upended black hole cosmology and forever changed the applications of both quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity.
[spoilers removed]
“Hawking laid the foundations, and one after another his compatriots built an edifice upon them.” ~Kip Thorne, theoretical physicist, 2003
*Science Popularizer: (also known as science ambassadors) any person who attempts to help the public understand how science works, the findings of science, and how science relates to public policy; an interpreter of science for general audiences. Science popularizers may be scientists themselves or they may also be professional science journalists.
With the publication of his book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, Hawking transitioned from relevant scientist to phenomenal celebrity. A transition that was exponentially magnified by Hawking’s degenerative disability, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
It is here, in Hawking’s dichotomy of scientist versus celebrity, where author Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking sinks its proverbial teeth. Seife draws a stark contrast between public perception and reality. Not since Albert Einstein had anyone captured the world’s collective imagination the way Stephen Hawking did. And, much like Einstein, Hawking’s popularity overshadowed contemporaries of equal (or perhaps even greater) scientific importance.
“To compare Hawking to Newton or Einstein is just nonsense. There is no physicist alive who compares to Einstein or Bohr in ability. But those rather grottily researched little biographies of Galileo and Newton in A Brief History do rather invite you to put Hawking in that same sequence. In a list of the 12 best theoretical physicists this century Steve would be nowhere near.” ~John Barrow, theoretical physicist, 1992
This echoes a recollection Neil deGrasse Tyson, himself an astrophysicist and science popularizer, had of a physics conference in 1991:
“We all agreed that [Stephen Hawking] is a pretty smart guy, and that he is an excellent physicist. But we further agreed that he falls below a dozen other physicists from the twentieth century, most of whom the public has never heard of.” ~NdT (The Sky Is Not the Limit, pg 131)
Wherever one ranks Stephen Hawking on the 20th century’s cosmological scale of relevance, it was not Bohr or de Broglie or Dirac or Eddington or Fermi or Heisenberg or Planck or whomever that brought theoretical physics into the limelight of public consciousness, it was Stephen.
“Have you heard? Have you heard what Stephen has discovered? Everything is different. Everything is changed!” ~Martin Rees, cosmologist and astrophysicist, 1974