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Stephen Hawking is a mediocre scientist

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J

Jackpot

Banned
Saw this and it irked me a bit

You know you're in trouble when Stephen Hawking says types it...
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http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=943519

mainly because it isn't even Hawking's field but also because people seem to have swallowed this idea that Hawking is a super-human genius whose every utterance should be accepted verbatim.

Fact is his science is rather lacking and it looks like his hypotheses won't even have that lasting an impact on his field. How much do you know about his theories and how much of your impressions of him are from his media appearances and voice over work? I'm trying to dig up an article I read years ago that covered the same subject and quoted many leading physicists as saying Hawking wouldn't even be in their top 10.

Hawking's main theory about black holes was disproved and he later came up with an even more unlikely theory about them. Just recently he wrote a new paper and it was full of holes.

http://www.space.com/24454-stephen-hawking-black-hole-theory.html

"Hawking's paper is short [2 pages] and does not have a lot of detail, so it is not clear what his precise picture is, or what the justification is," Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute
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Current theories about black holes hinge upon what's known as the "firewall paradox."
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.
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However, this idea doesn't seem to address the firewall paradox at all, said Raphael Bousso, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It's not possible to have both of those things, to have no drama at the apparent horizon and to have the information come out," Bousso told SPACE.com. "Stephen just doesn't discuss this argument, so it's unclear how he means to address it."

Don Page, physicist at the University of Alberta in Canada, agreed. "I do not think that eliminating event horizons by itself solves the firewall problem, which is a subtle problem," he wrote in an email.

And an event horizon-free black hole isn't a new proposal, either, Page said.

"The idea that a black hole does not truly have an event horizon goes back more than a third of a century, and I would not be surprised if someone could trace it back even many years earlier," Page told SPACE.com via email.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but it's all just hype.
 
S

Stet

Banned
Jackpot said:
Saw this and it irked me a bit



http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=943519

mainly because it isn't even Hawking's field but also because people seem to have swallowed this idea that Hawking is a super-human genius whose every utterance should be accepted verbatim.

Fact is his science is rather lacking and it looks like his hypotheses won't even have that lasting an impact on his field. How much do you know about his theories and how much of your impressions of him are from his media appearances and voice over work? I'm trying to dig up an article I read years ago that covered the same subject and quoted many leading physicists as saying Hawking wouldn't even be in their top 10.

Hawking's main theory about black holes was disproved and he later came up with an even more unlikely theory about them. Just recently he wrote a new paper and it was full of holes.

http://www.space.com/24454-stephen-hawking-black-hole-theory.html





Sorry, but it's all just hype.
Click to expand...

He was a pioneering scientist. Bohr isn't a bad scientist because his atomic model was disproven. That's dumb.
 
U

UncleSporky

Member
I think the popular opinion about him stems from the idea that this is a man with a brain and ideas so valuable that we hooked it up to a machine just to keep it running.

Seems like kind of a natural assumption to make, like a sci-fi come to life. Everyone wants to believe that.
 
T

twobear

sputum-flecked apoplexy
I don't think it's fair to call Hawking a 'mediocre' scientist. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems are fairly important in GR, and his prediction of the existence of Hawking radiation was pretty surprising at the time.

I do think people only have a somewhat dim idea of his accomplishments and stature in physics, though. Certainly a lot of people I talk to seem surprised when I say that he's not remotely in the same league as the early-to-mid 20th century physicists that laid down the foundations of quantum mechanics. Lots of people seem to think he's a modern Einstein.
 
W

Who

Banned
I agree. Listening to him has never really made my ears perk up as much as the likes of Carl Sagan, Einstein, or Tesla

He has a very boring and kind of depressing view of the universe where those three have such a fascinating sometimes almost mystical view on things.


terrisus said:
image.php
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Dammit.
 
T

Trey

Member
There are more wrong as shit scientists in history than correct ones.

Hell, Einstein was wrong as shit before and it led to the modern interpretation of quantum mechanics.

That's science.
 
I

injurai

Banned
Someone forgot science is an evolving magisteria and people are must first work through hypothesis and conjectures before finally arriving at impartial working theories.

That critic could learn a thing or two from Feynman. It's exciting that we don't know things.
 
K

Kill3r7

Member
Jackpot said:
Fact is his science is rather lacking and it looks like his hypotheses won't even have that lasting an impact on his field. How much do you know about his theories and how much of your impressions of him are from his media appearances and voice over work? I'm trying to dig up an article I read years ago that covered the same subject and quoted many leading physicists as saying Hawking wouldn't even be in their top 10.
.
Click to expand...

Agreed Hawking is probably right outside the top 10 but that isn't a slight on his achievements. The only "contemporary" (a bit of a stretch) of his is Feynman (who was an absolute genius and could teach physics to a monkey). Everyone else was before his time.

EDIT: Totally forgot about Paul Dirac though he was a bit before him as was Feynman.
 
G

Giggzy

Member
Who cares if his theories are/were proved wrong. The more we disprove what we believe is true, the closer we get to proving what's fact.
 
Q

Quixzlizx

Member
Who said:
I agree. Listening to him has never really made my ears perk up as much as the likes of Carl Sagan, Einstein, or Tesla

He has a very boring and kind of depressing view of the universe where those three have such a fascinating sometimes almost mystical view on things.




Dammit.
Click to expand...

I find it amusing that you are rating scientists based on your emotional reaction to them.
 
S

samn

Member
I think the issue the OP is putting across isn't that Hawking is wrong therefore he's a bad scientist; it's that he's engaging poorly in the debate.

"Hawking's paper is short [2 pages] and does not have a lot of detail, so it is not clear what his precise picture is, or what the justification is," Joseph Polchinski of the Kavli Institute
Click to expand...
 
S

Sickboy007

Member
I don't see how you could conceivably call him a "mediocre scientist". I'm pretty sure Caltech and Cambridge don't grant professorship out of human sympathy or hype.
 
E

ersocaster

Member
The foundations of Science were formulated by a bunch of people who were proven wrong. And being in someone's top ten does not make you a terrible Scientist.

Go look at those top ten Physicists. I have no doubt they are all over 100 and were proven wrong a thousand times.
 
I

Iceman

Member
(not a physicist. But a biologist. And recently in discussion with a theoretical phycisist about the firewall paradox)

My understanding is that hawking radiation survives the firewall paradox due to entanglement. The quantum information escapes* (within a paired/twin particle) even as an individual particle dives into and is destroyed by the singularity.

*not every particle's quantum information will escape a black hole in such a way - just some of them.

Please tear multidimensional holes in this line of thinking.

Most important mathematical/physics papers are fairly short, I understand. As an analogy, the most cited paper in biology is less than a page long - a letter to the editor.
 
W

Who

Banned
Quixzlizx said:
I find it amusing that you are rating scientists based on your emotional reaction to them.
Click to expand...

I'm not rating any scientists I just said I prefer thier point of views over his. Can scientists not all think differently? Can I not favor one perspective over another? I don't really see what you're getting at tbh
 
Trojita

Trojita

Rapid Response Threadmaker
bitocoder said:
The foundations of Science were formulated by a bunch of people who were proven wrong. And being in someone's top ten does not make you a terrible Scientist.

Go look at those top ten Physicists. I have no doubt they are all over 100 and were proven wrong a thousand times.
Click to expand...

He said many leading Physicists wouldn't put Hawking in their top 10.
 
S

Sheroking

Member
Aesius said:
He's a celebrity scientist like Bill Nye
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Well, no.

Nye was an engineer who worked on airplanes before pursuing a side interest as a sketch comedian. He's now an educator and consultant. He's not "fake" really, he's a smart dude with qualifications, he's just not on the forefront of scientific breakthroughs. He's arguably just as important, because people like him and Dr. Tyson are the unofficial PR wing of all of science. Their work may one day might help fund important breakthroughs.

Hawking meanwhile, is famous for the noise his hypothesis' made, and his medical condition made him a human interest story. He's legit. He's said and written some crazy shit lately, and he's not a modern Einstein figure laying down scientific bedrock, but he's not a "bad scientist". He's a theoretical physicist and being 100% correct is not his job description. Posing workable hypothesis' to test, prove or disprove will inevitably lead to a greater understanding of our universe.
 
N

Neuromancer

Member
Let's have this fight right now. Who are everyone's top 10 scientists? I'll go first.


  1. Einstein
  2. Edison
  3. Copernicus
  4. Whitney
  5. DaVinci
  6. Archimedes
  7. Nye
  8. DeGrasse Tyson
  9. Sagan
  10. Perkins
 
kruis

kruis

Exposing the sinister cartel of retailers who allow companies to pay for advertising space.
So publishing one contested paper makes Hawking a "mediocre" scientist?
 
E

ersocaster

Member
Trojita said:
He said many leading Physicists wouldn't put Hawking in their top 10.
Click to expand...

Why would they?

If I were to name my top 10 programmers, they would all be historical figures. I imagine it is much the same with Physics. There have been so many historical Physicists that it would be crazy to list any modern one within that debate. People like Einstein, Newton, Pascal, etc. are the founders of modern Science. No discovery today outside of the discovery of dark matter/energy and how to use it will be anything close to what these guys accomplished.
 
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