[HN Gopher] The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen H...
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       The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen Hawking
        
       Author : miobrien
       Score  : 14 points
       Date   : 2021-03-15 14:26 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.prospectmagazine.co.uk)
        
       | abhinav22 wrote:
       | Did he actually discover anything of worth or was most of his
       | items refuted or unproven?
       | 
       | I don't know him well but don't rate him highly
        
         | joshu wrote:
         | hawking radiation?
        
       | Angostura wrote:
       | The article doesn't really provide any evidence that he was
       | 'deifyed'
       | 
       | The opening section quotes an anecdote about Hawking referring to
       | his chances of winning a Nobel:
       | 
       | "Most doubtless saw this as an example of Hawking's famous wit.
       | But in truth it gives a clue to the physicist's elusive
       | character: shamelessly self-promoting to the point of arrogance,
       | and heedless of what others might think."
       | 
       | Or, more likely, given the context - he was actually being funny
       | and poking fun at his own reputation, as it appears.
        
         | ak_111 wrote:
         | Actually it does, this is from one paragraph from the article
         | (there are more examples, and probably more from the book that
         | the article is a review of):
         | 
         | "Hawking became "as much a brand as he was a person," says
         | Seife. Billionaire entrepreneurs traded on his name, from Yuri
         | Milner to Richard Branson and Jeffrey Epstein (whose vanity
         | conference on gravity in the Virgin Islands the physicist
         | attended in 2006). In exchange, Hawking was taken on zero-
         | gravity flights and invited to glitzy events and launches. This
         | hawking of Hawking continues today: for a mere PS19,000 you can
         | buy a gold watch inlaid, like some medieval jewel-encrusted
         | reliquary bearing a shard of Christ's cross, with wooden disks
         | "taken from the desk at which Hawking contemplated the
         | mysteries of the universe."
        
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