My professor told me that Hawking has done nothing significant in phyics like other great physicist. He's just popular due to his disability and perseverance. How much is this true about him?
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He's mostly well-known in the public because he wrote popular-level books. It's not that he wasn't great, but other similarly great physicists get far less public recognition.
If your professor is a particularly meat-and-potatoes kind of guy who thinks people shouldn't bother poking around black holes when there's still real physics to be done, then they might think Hawking has done nothing significant in the kinds of physics that they like. But The Hawk has certainly made some major contributions.
This is very true. Nobody knows who John Bardeen or William Shockley were. That’s like not knowing who invented the transistor or who developed superconductor theory.
Oh wait, it is that!
And I could name other very impactful physicists that the general public is unaware of. But you get the idea.
Did physics undergrad at Illinois and not many people (undergrad students) there are familiar with him. One of the quads is named after him.
I always found it funny he’s the only person to ever win two nobel prizes in physics but the physics department was like “i’ve never seen this man in my life”
i also didn’t know gell-mann was briefly affiliated w uiuc until after, either
Honestly it's worse than that in my experience. Most of the people I meet know who Newton was but they give a description like "he invented/discovered/figured out gravity" or something. I once dropped a call by entering a Faraday cage in a test facility and said "oops, Michael Faraday hung up on them" and another engineer said "is that who invented this thing?"
William Shockley, Stanford professor and winner of the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his co-invention of the transistor, was arguably the single person most responsible for ushering in the computer age. He was also an ardent eugenicist whose theories of black racial inferiority eventually made him an academic pariah.
That is likely why.
That’s some supervillain shit right there.
Dr. Shock!!!
I only know Shockley die to the diodes named after him
Never heard him called "The Hawk" but I like it and that's what I'll call him from now on.
I stole it from this.
Also, don't forget about his moderately successful DJ career [NSFW]
Also this https://youtu.be/5sp4RUzVFIk
Don't forget his epic rap battle career.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k
Also this https://youtu.be/5sp4RUzVFIk
All his shootings be drive bys.
didn't a nobel prizxe get awarded just after Stephen Hawking died when hawking radiation was proved? Isn't it likely that Stephen Hawking would have shared this nobel prize if he lived ?
If you mean singularity theorems, then that was Penrose in 2020. Not just after Hawking death, but a few years. That was part of the prize along with the experimental side imaging. Not experimental confirmation of the radiation (that seems unlikely to happen for a long time given the smallness of the effect). Hawking did work on singularity theorems with Penrose.
What about John Archibald Wheeler?
I just cringed my soul out at "The Hawk".
Is he overrated:
By people who put him with Einstein or Newton or even Feynman or Dirac? Yes.
By people who rank him as one of the big names in gravitation and cosmology? No.
His most famous achievements among the public are in very speculative theoretical physics which may later turn out to be discredited, but even if that happens his work in mathematical physics still stands. For example his work on singularity theorems.
Yes and No.
Hawking DID have some significant contributions to physics, but his popularity is more due to his illness and appearances in pop media.
There are scientists who contributed far more and are not nearly as well known.
I'm assuming this was your professor's input. Seems particularly dismissive.
Hawking published 55 papers in Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters. The latter is considered one of the most prestigious journals in physics.
Doesn't matter whether you're disabled, have a ton of perserverence, or otherwise.
You bring good effort to the table and that's all that matters. The rest will follow.
Not sure that's a very good measure, lots of physicists have published in PRL and Hawking's contributions are more significant than the vast majority of them.
Then it can be a good measure as a lower bound I suppose
I don't know if I would call it dismissive, so long as what he was saying is that some of his fame comes from the fact that he overcame incredible odds to become a physicist, an already impressive achievement for an able bodied intelligent person to do. I mean, that story is worth telling and people who don't care about physics still tend to know who he was.
Any physicist that has equations and phenomena named after them is probably more significant that your prof. Dude sounds jealous
Based
And theres a tendency to hate on people that write books for the laymen.
Likely both of these cases.
He probably claims to read faster than Helen Keller.
Nice! So, his professor has to be more popular than stephen in order to scientifically criticize him, otherwise he’s just jealous. Nice logic!
You poopy and big dumb dumb
Yep! Now I am certain that you’re either a child or a man child.
Setting aside his disability, objectively speaking, by bibliometrics and other indicators of academic success, Hawking would still be regarded as an extraordinarily influential and successful scientist. According to Google Scholar, he has more than 136800 citations (h index 130), only a small fraction of which are references to his popular books. His most cited work is The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime by Hawking and Ellis, an excellent reference on gravitation. It's a good bet that Hawking's 1975 article "Particle Creation by Black Holes" alone may have more citations (14k+) than your professor has in total.
Setting aside his fame, most physicists would be overjoyed to have a professional career with as much impact as Hawking's. I know mine pales in comparison (though I do have quite a few more articles in Phys. Rev. Lett. and Nature, showing perhaps how little "vanity press" publication means in the grand scheme of things).
Perhaps he's overrated (and I do agree that he's no Einstein or Newton), but to claim that he's done nothing significant in physics is simply false.
Going to object here to citation count and h-index being a good measure of someone's impact.
edit: Why h-indices are misleading https://sfdora.org/resource/halt-the-h-index/
Go on
I edited the comment above, but this is a start https://sfdora.org/resource/halt-the-h-index/
I agree with some of the arguments but not others. For example, I think that most people mentally weight h-indices by age, that people compare h-indices within fields and not across them, and that h-index does reflect quality of research (to a degree).
Surprisingly they didn’t mention a major limitation of them: inflated h-indices for people in large collaborations like CMS or LIGO. I know grad students with thousands of citations per paper because they’re one of 3,000 authors on a major result.
what's your prefered metric?
I do not think we should be judging scientists by any kind of numerical metric. All of them are misleading, each in their own way.
This is like my experimentalist friends who don't believe in trusting computational models because they're approximations.
It might be if you're comparing two scientists with roughly similar numbers. But when we're talking almost an order of magnitude differences, the metrics are a pretty good indication.
I guess in the same sense that a BMI is useless unless it's an order of magnitude difference, sure. The downside of doing that (for both h-index and BMI) is that it normalizes the use of a metric, which is then applied to situations where it doesn't work well.
As a field, we can do better in assessing someone's contributions than just pulling numbers out of a formula that (insert random physicist) cooked up.
That pretty much just says:
People with long careers doing lots of work have high h-indices. (Yes, that's the point of why we're using it here)
You can't compare h-index between fields with different publication rates (valid concern, but that number is extremely high, regardless of what field we're talking about)
It encourages self-reference (this is an issue, and is why excluding self-citation is importantish. b-index does this)
It doesn't consider anything other than publications (We're only talking about publications when using h-index, so yes)
Obviously it shouldn't be used as a hard metric for hiring decisions or whatever, but it is actually a pretty solid barometer for the influence of a given person's published work on a field.
H indices, citation counts, and other bibliometric data are far from perfect, though they're broadly (if imperfectly) correlated with impact. In my experience serving on award and fellowship committees, hiring boards, and promotion panels, they're almost always the start of a conversation on a scientist's contributions, not the end. And they are almost never discussed without additional context.
I wish I could say the same. I've seen them used entirely without context.
the thing about hawking is he was popular because he was able to explain things in the way anyone could understand them. it takes someone overly skilled in their field to be able to do that especially when its something like physics. most college professors would have trouble teaching high school age kids that didnt have back knowledge etc.
hawking is able to explain things so well i read a book by him when i was like 12 or so about quarks and such in the early 2000s and i not only understood it, but i remembered it well enough to ask my high school teacher about if we would cover them when the class went over the syllabus.
considering he was able to do this and as others have said done most of this in his head, he really was remarkable.
I think this is so underrated by many. I'm not discounting his contribution to physics, but to be able to excite the general public about a very difficult to explain topic, from which much of the funding for physics comes from, and to inspire young people to become physicists, is a special talent.
I'm a programmer and data analysis professional who is also a physics fanboy. I have done some of the easier math in my younger days but continue to read (and follow this subreddit) because of Hawking who I read in my early 20's. I've passed that on to my son who wants to become an astrophysicist.
Hawking famously said you lose half your audience w your first equation. My opinions may be screwed, because I love math, but I don’t actually think this is the correct approach.
Physics and math are inseparable and in some ways are two sides of the same coin (see 1700s or earlier same ppl working on both). Therefore, I often feel that popular science without technical detail or, particularly, physics without math is not physics. It might be some that resembles physics it might similar, but I don’t think it is physics without math
There might be a time and place for it, but I don’t think holding up hawking as the gold standard for stem communication is it.
I disagree to some of what you said. I don't understand a fraction of the math involved in physics, and I don't pretend I'm a physicist, but I enjoy the theories and meaning behind it very much. I also pay taxes which help fund much of physics research. So having me as a proponent for physics is important.
So no, I will never understand it thoroughly and I recognize that. But if the only exposure I received was the math because otherwise I was not "worthy" of the knowledge, I would be intellectually locked out and no longer interested. I would not be an evangelist for the important work being done to help convince others of the same. All this from reading Hawking.
No, I'm sure that I myself have not persuaded many people, maybe a dozen in my lifetime, but I'm an average person with an average circle of friends.
It's not about being worthy. The problem is popular science, in my mind at least, muddies the waters and makes people think that science says there is a multiverse (it doesn't. It doesn't say there isn't one but there is no SCIENCE that says a multiverse exists). I have no problem with conveying science to the public at large. This is of course important work. But, works like Hawking's tend to speak about things without empirical evidence as fact. It confuses the field, and causes people to misunderstand what it means to be a physicist.
Additionally, the point of physics isn't to generate interest. It's to solve meaningful problems. There are enough people interested in doing that (though our education system could be better at preparing them to do so, to be fair).
this is it! his contributions to science communication are an accomplishment of their own right.
i dont think youve ever read anything he wrote, if you think that. 98% of his work is incomprehensible word salad and observationless musings about how he imagines things work. after all, the best way to disguise your gibberish psuedo-science is with vague gibberish statements that dont really say anything.
didnt you go to some building today that told ya to be a good person and not some mean crab ass spreading anger? did you already forget your 11 am lesson? bro this comment was from a year ago. LOL
what in the actual fuck are you talking about? 11am lesson? how high were you when you gibbered that out?
‘‘Twas a joke about church dimwit
Here's the thing about theoretical physicists: It often takes awhile to observe the phenomena for which they've made predictions for/against. We're still testing a lot of Einstein's work to this day.
Hawking has a phenomenon named after him. Hawking Radiation. It's never been observed, nor has it been disproven, primarily because we don't have a means by which to observe black holes in such fine resolution.
It is a possible solution to the information paradox though, and would indicate that black holes follow the laws of thermodynamics.
This is only one example of his work.
So the question for you is, even if his theory turns out to be incorrect, has he contributed nothing to the field?
And the fact that he did it all in his head because he couldn't just scribble some notes down.
Isn't it the root of the paradox?
Yes, Hawking's biggest contribution to the black hole information paradox is that he's the guy who pointed it out in the first place.
I don't think that hawking radiation solves the black hole information paradox directly. The radiation is thermal, it only encodes the surface area of the BH
It's only thermal for large black holes. Theoretically any virtual particle can be made real by the process of hawking radiation, and since it's rate of emission inversely proportional to its mass, most of the radiation from persistent black holes is just thermal since they decay slowly enough they only emit low energy photons. As they get smaller and smaller the particles emitted get more and more massive until it's essentially a supernova. So anything that fell in can be reproduced in parts by hawking radiation.
If I understand hawking's theories correctly that is.
Do you have a paper or something where I can read more about this? Wikipedia, scholarpedia, and papers like this one https://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-th/9209058.pdf (which is old but gives a great overview imo) define Hawking radiation as thermal. I don't see a mass dependence in their arguments. I know of some newer theories that are mentioned e.g. https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-most-famous-paradox-in-physics-nears-its-end-20201029/ in here, but Hawkings original calculation is different as far as I understand it.
The paradox is actually the fact that the radiation is predicted to be thermal, while under unitary evolution it is impossible to go from a pure state to a mixed state.
Yes he is. Hawkin has done some potentially great discoveries like Hawkin radiation, cosmology things and was in important in the discussions about blackholes with Susskind. But he is hyped like he is of importance with Einstein or Feynman which he is not.
He made significant contributions to physics. He was also a celebrity for other reasons
Comment removed by moderator
Even if it’s never proven, the work itself is a major contribution.
I dunno. I would know about Hawking even if he were not disabled and I'm not a physicist (social psychologist, here). I first knew about him from his books and his papers on singularity theory.
I suspect that the reason he is often dismissed is similar to why Einstein faced dismissive attitudes early on. He's a theoretical physicist.
Well his name is on a certain type of radiation, so he’s got that going for him. Other than that, you’d probably never hear of him or come across his work learning physics.
In short, he made a good impact in one area that is not related to that much else besides black holes. Take that how you will.
Penrose just received the Nobel price for work done together with Hawking
people who talk like your professor are bitter twerps
even if it were true (it’s not) have some decency and keep it to yourself, he is an inspiration regardless
There are already many good, relevant answers here. Let me tell you about my perspective and how it changed when I started doing research in quantum gravity.
I used to think Hawking was overrated too, and mostly known for his disability and popular works. Sure, I had learned Hawking radiation and the Bekenstein-Hawking - and having even one thing named after you is already a big enough accomplishment - but I didn't hold him at the top. Then, this year, I started working on quantum gravity with black holes. The main idea is that you assume the existence of a theory of quantum gravity and mimic the path integral formalism from QFT. Then, you can treat the classical solutions to the Einstein equations as saddle points of the action and compute the path integral semi-classically, without knowing what the theory of quantum gravity looks like. This reproduces the results from the thermodynamics of black holes. This was Hawking (with others, of course).
If you dig into modern stuff like the AdS/CFT correspondence, you will find that the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy is a fundamental idea for the holographic principle. The holographic principle is the nest of the AdS/CFT correspondence, which is now one of the most researched topics in HEP. In the various forms that the correspondence takes, Hawking holds a very important place: the saddle point approximation discussed lets the correspondence apply to classical AdS solutions, the counterterms for AdS divergences are also contain his name,...
And all that does not even cover his work in cosmology and quantum cosmology, where he allegedly contributed the most. Hawking is definitely a foundational mind for modern HEP, and your teacher suggesting that he is not has either never done any research in that area, or is terribly biased/jealous. Hawking is literally inevitable.
Is this a physics professor? Sounds like they haven’t read much of Hawking’s work.
This is likely an extension of the Sagan effect, which is still alive and well today in academia. Here’s a recentish paper/discussion about it:
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/36/7/2077
Stephen Hawking has done a lot of great work, but in general scientists that participate in pop sci and communicate more with the public are often seen as less academically productive by the academic community, even if this is untrue.
That’s such bs though. Sagan could never have avg’ed a paper a month if he wasn’t Carl Sagan. The bar was much lower for him to publish because everyone knows who he is. That’s the lowest hanging explanation which is just glossed over by the author.
95% (ie some extreme high fraction) of academics spend their entire life toiling away in anonymity. The challenge in becoming renowned is getting ppl to read your papers as much as it is writing them. You’re hawking, you’re Sagan you just get to skip that whole problem.
It far from shocking that popular scientist produce more impactful work. Name recognition
Edit: to be clear, I do buy that many academics bear some sort of stigma against colleagues that produce Works and popular science! I also liked the article but I just couldn’t believe that author didn’t acknowledge that some of the statistics toted might be completely biased
Sure, I agree with what you posted. I should have been more specific in saying that I specifically think “hawking has done nothing significant in physics” is likely a somewhat biased claim, premised on the fact that he did pop science stuff. Is he the smartest and best physicist ever? Definitely not. Would he have done pretty good work anyways? For sure. Are this professors views likely influenced by some form of Sagan effect type situation? I think they might be. But of course I might be wrong.
Yes! I like!
A better question would be: "Why do we rate physicist or any scientist?"
We have a common goal as a scientist which is to make discovery in science or more poetically, unravel the mystery of the world we live in. I don't see why should one be rated. Yes, some do contribute more than another. But they also did made discovery for us regardless of how much one discovered.
There are tons of reasons as to why people rate scientists. In some cases, it's just for fun the same way you'd ask "who's the best singer?" or "was this writer as good as they say, or was he overrated?". In real life, though, metrics like citation number and the h-index are a good way for institutions to figure out in someone is worth hiring, for example.
But they are in reality biased and a terrible way to figure out if someone is worth hiring. Thankfully more people are realizing this.
Hawking Radiation beams focus on your prof
Your professor is jealous. That's really all there is to it.
| Hawking has done nothing significant in phyics
This is utter nonsense and your professor should be embarrassed for saying that. Others in the thread have already covered his contributions (black hole thermodynamics, hawking radiation - one of the first successful attempts to unify QM and GR, singularity theorem, inflation, arrow of time, etc ...)
What shouldn't be ignored is that he accomplished all of this with ALS. That's pretty damn impressive in and of itself. If one was particularly cold-hearted you could argue he's a bit more famous than his purely physics accomplishments warrant. But we're allowed to be proud of people that accomplish things in the face of adversity.
I really hope you are paraphrasing your professor incorrectly. It's not a good look for them.
Depends I guess. On one hand he took a topic that is… dry… to put it nicely, and made it accessible to more of the public. That is a big contribution. Science has to be accessible to everyone or it will fall into dogma and die.
As many of people said he had contributed but there are many who contributed more but didn’t get the recognition they deserve. But for someone in his condition to do all that is quite an accomplishment.
He’s the Lady Gaga of physics.
Yes.
Our brains can't tell the difference between being interested in someone for having an inspiring, enlightening or comforting life story and being interested in them for having inspiring, enlightening, or comforting ideas. The corresponding chemicals just get dumped into our limbic system like water into a bathtub and we react as though it was the same.
EDIT: This sounds really weird the first time you hear it, I know. But think about the fact that the Boston Marathon Bomber was put on the cover of Rolling Stone as though he were a rock star. And also that chocolate makes you feel like you're in love. You can only tell the difference between the things hitting these same piano keys in your brain in certain circumstances where we appear to be objective and rational.
I think most people can separate the two. Spud Webb was a very good basketball player in the NBA and was 5' 7". Many basketball fans can respect the fact that he played big despite his small stature and not think he deserves to be in the HOF.
Jim Abbott was a good MLB pitcher with one hand. He even pitched a no-hitter. We can respect and admire his accomplishments without putting him in the HOF.
We have the ability to admire someone who overcomes adversity to make it to a high level without going over the top. However, Hawking was a great physicist AND overcame a tremendous physical challenge.
It appears that we can separate the two when the other influences are roughly at balance. For example, you can tell whether Robert DeNiro or Al Pacino is a better actor in your opinion, you cannot tell whether Robert DeNiro or Al Jabloski who you've never heard of before and has no reputation is a better actor.
Per your example, you can judge the relative talents of two famous basketball players, you cannot judge the relative talent of a famous basketball player compared to one you've never seen before. It will just feel like the famous player is better, even if he's not (studies have been done with switching and removing names that establish this clearly) but you won't necessarily be able to explain why. You'd think the objective numbers would help, I even thought they would when I was working on this earlier, but even those don't, because the context effects your ability to tell whether those numbers are worth pursuing.
So for an example, Neils Abel who at the time was unknown, sent a solution to the Quintic Equation to the office of Carl Gauss. Gauss's assistant, according to his own account, read the paper, saw no errors in it, and still didn't pay any more attention to it, because according to him "he didn't think someone that young could have solved it." Likewise, Gauss threw the paper away calling it "another one of those monstrosities." Even when the numbers are right, the ability to judge the numbers, or anything subjective, falls apart when the external influences that we don't realize are there disappear. This is why Einstein, Beethoven, Isaac Newton, Mozart, Van Gogh, Pavarotti, and hundreds of other famously talented people spent years being ignored for seemingly no apparent reason before they suddenly got accepted because the external emotional associations around their work, and who recommended it, suddenly changed.
This is why double-blind refereeing in academic papers produces such bizarre results and empty feedback. Taking away the emotional context in which people normally judge things means everything they read comes up as insufficient to recommend. So, like Gauss's assistant, they just make up a reason to say no. When they do recommend something, it's due to any random emotional boost they can find. Which thus seems similarly random. If the same papers are all given similar recommendations and credentialed names, then those referees will suddenly be extremely rational and able to judge the work.
That situation in which we DO appear to make rational judgments of things, like comparing people who already have fame, charisma, or social momentum and having our emotional judgement of the work itself break the tie, is something I've come to term a 'rational plateau.' But in reality, the human mind can't process ideas in a vacuum. And never has been able to.
This is probably scattershot, I've done quite a lot of work on this topic and am working on a couple books related to it too.
I have a theory that he was just a prototype AI connected to a vegetable to power him matrix style to hide it. They gave it that body so it wouldn't go rogue and start being a giant murder robot terminator style.
This did not age well, smh.
Well this age like milk. Bro was on Epstein island and had a orgy with minors 😅
Oof