[HN Gopher] Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity
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Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity
Author : andrewl
Score : 30 points
Date : 2022-03-10 13:11 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (inference-review.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (inference-review.com)
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| So the book is critical about the fact that Hawking was a
| celebrity, among other things. I get it, but personally I'd much
| prefer it there were more phycisists, mathematicians, doctors,
| biologists, etc etc. celebrities. We spend way too much time and
| money on people who kick a ball for a living, or who pretend to
| sing or act, while displaying their good looks. We can do better
| than that.
| Alekhine wrote:
| I used to be critical of athlete worship, as many nerds are,
| until I actually started becoming athletic.
|
| I still don't like sports culture, but I appreciate athleticism
| much more now. Intelligence, while important, is not the sole
| measure of a persons value, and its not a bad thing for a
| culture to value physicality. It's a very human thing, just
| like curiosity or creativity. Of course it would be nicer if we
| valued intellect to the same degree, but here we are.
|
| Point is, its not just kicking a ball. Its a lifetime of work
| and passion. A scientist does not have greater moral worth than
| an athlete or artist. These aren't worthless pursuits only
| idiots focus on.
| williamtrask wrote:
| I think a comparison of the relative impact of Nobel Prize
| winners and Olympic gold medal winners would dispute your
| claim regarding moral worth. I can't think of an athletic
| equivalent to the invention of vaccines, solar power,
| democracy, the internet, or even the concept of morality
| itself.
| Alekhine wrote:
| In the grand scheme, those things are more important. But
| coming up with an idea or solving a puzzle does not make a
| person better than another. Getting an Olympic medal could
| take equivalent effort to making a major scientific
| breakthrough. Its just that the kind of effort being made
| is different.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| By that metric, most people are worthless.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Would celebrity status help scientists do their job, though?
| yazaddaruvala wrote:
| Yes!
|
| Science/engineering influencers are becoming more popular and
| doing a great job getting themselves funding and also
| generating very impressive content.
|
| Look into -
|
| https://www.veritasium.com/ - crazy science education and
| practical experiments to "prove new science". Check out the
| series of videos on a sail powered car that moves faster than
| the wind that pushes it!!! It sounds impossible, and then
| Derek shows that it's possible! Including all the debates
| with other scientists about it. Also check out the "how
| energy flows" and all the reaction videos - this topic hasn't
| yet been explored further tho so be prepared to wait (if this
| type of conversation isn't science I don't know what is).
|
| Mark Rober's creative engineering classes, science based
| philanthropy with TeamSeas are meeting his goal of being
| effectively inspiring. This dude is going to generate a
| similar magnitude of new scientists and engineers as The
| Beatles have and keep generating new musicians.
|
| https://youtube.com/c/K%C3%A1rolyZsolnai - People always
| wonder why I'm optimistic about the future. Karoly and his
| channel are a small but important part of why! Watching the
| pace of innovation here is the only way to truly understand
| the catch phrase "What a time to be alive!". He curates
| scientific papers and gets them visibility better than the
| legacy science publications. This channel is the "new Nature
| magazine" and it's funded by relevant/educational ads.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Morris - Hamilton's
| work documenting the effects of narcotics and also the
| scientific pathways behind them is inspiring. His team and
| him haven't so much created videos or video essays as they
| have created the first audio-visual encyclopedia.
|
| I'm sure there are many more I'm forgetting or haven't yet
| heard of. You can also look into the Stanford/Harvard
| professors, the research doctors, the dermatologists, etc
| that are getting into YouTube/podcasts because it's a better
| medium to have scientific information disseminated and
| hopefully draw more donations for their research.
|
| Not all science influencers are doing "real science" yet.
| Some of them are "science news/educators" others "science
| documentarians" but many of them are already directly
| contributing to "real innovative science". Pushing the
| boundaries of human knowledge and getting "paid" to show it
| off!!!
|
| Yes it takes a bit of curation to find the content creators
| that are also doing "real science" but for me it's a no-
| brainer: in 100 years, because of the monetary incentives,
| more innovation will come from donation/ad based "science
| content creators" (on YouTube/podcasts/similar) than from
| legacy academic institutions.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| One can think of potential downsides, but the upsides would
| include:
|
| - More money flowing into science
|
| - More talent flowing into science
| williamtrask wrote:
| If a billion dollars and all the followers/imitators were
| redirected from Kim Kardashian to the latest Nobel Prize
| winner, sure!
|
| It would change science sure, but monogrammed Microscopes and
| signed stethoscopes are probably better than the equivalent
| in makeup and fast fashion.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| AFAIK the French are more prone to scientific celebrities, but
| this has led to cult like institutions. Here competition for
| popular attention has led to increasingly outlandish claims and
| predictions. I would be happier with less scientific
| celebrities and less politics in science. A dry, austere,
| monkish existence where the only reward is recognition from
| your immediate peers.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Hawking's reputation can take the hit, and it's always good to
| have a skeptical counterpoint to a hagiographical mainstream.
| Reexamining someone's intellectual legacy now and then is
| worthwhile.
| hirundo wrote:
| I've thought Hawking was being a bit over-marketed since the Star
| Trek Deep Space Nine episode where they place him next to Newton
| and Einstein as three great physicists in history. That scene was
| a lot of fun and I'm glad they did it. But there's a lot of room
| for being a great physicist without being a Newton or an
| Einstein, and that does seem to apply to Hawking, even if you
| agree completely with this article.
| ObscureScience wrote:
| I agree that it's hard to compare people's intellect,
| especially dead vs living. However Newton and Einstein were
| humen as well, and not unlikely had their importance subject to
| exaggeration, misrepresentation and misunderstanding. When you
| become a celebrity other factors than significance comes into
| play, sometimes out of the control of the person.
| hirundo wrote:
| True. But Newton and Einstein revolutionized our
| understanding of the universe in a way that a Feynman,
| Hawking or Gell-Mann didn't. I doubt these gentlemen would
| have disagreed with that.
| qchris wrote:
| I'd be much more willing to put Gell-Mann on that list than
| Hawking or Feynman. To me, his discovery of the ability to
| make accurate predictions about the existence of
| fundamental particles based on symmetry groups forms a
| pillar of theoretical particle physics and the composition
| of the Standard Model, in the same kind of way that
| Einstein's application of differential geometry to the
| concept of space-time does.
|
| Newton will sort of always stand apart in that he was "the
| first", but I think that grouping Gell-Mann (no pun
| intended) with Hawking and Feynman, who although both
| brilliant and huge personalities, weren't the same level of
| "giant upon whose shoulders others stand" that Einstein and
| Gell-Mann's work ended up being is somewhat unfair.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| According to the book "When Einstein Walked with Godel"
| Einstein was not comfortable with all the attention and
| adoration he was receiving.
|
| One of the reason Einstein and Godel spent a lot of time
| together was that he did not care how famous Einstein was,
| and was not afraid to disagree. He was also not shy about
| sharing his own work with Einstein.
| wrycoder wrote:
| _Economist Oskar Morgenstern recounts that toward the end
| of his life Einstein confided that his "own work no longer
| meant much, that he came to the Institute merely ... to
| have the privilege of walking home with Godel"_
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Well, Newton and Hawking did both hold the same chair. If
| Cambridge is willing to put them beside each other Im not going
| to complain about Star Trek doing the same.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucasian_Professor_of_Mathemat...
| [deleted]
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Its not as if those are the only two to hold it.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There are only so many seats at a poker table.
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Hawking hawking Hawking...
|
| How far can that go?
|
| See: Buffalo8
|
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...)
| this-pony wrote:
| Reminds me of 'turtles all the way down',
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
| kevinventullo wrote:
| If the man himself had written this article, it would be
| Hawking hawking hawking Hawking.
| jethkl wrote:
| I had same thought - I suspect there is no upper bound. There
| are other examples of this sort of thing, but Hawking was new
| to me.
|
| Hawking! Stephen Hawking!
|
| Hawking hawking. Stephen Hawking peddling aggressively.
|
| Hawking hawking hawking. Stephen Hawking peddling "hunting with
| hawks."
|
| Hawking Hawking hawking hawking. A throat-cleering Stephen
| Hawking peddling the idea of hawking
|
| Hawking Hawking hawking hawking hawking. A throat-cleering
| Stephen Hawking peddling "throat-clearing hawking"
|
| Hawking Hawking hawking hawking Hawking hawking. A throat-
| cleering Stephen Hawking peddling "throat-clearing Stephen
| Hawking hawking"
| dmosley wrote:
| "Hawking hawking. Stephen Hawking peddling aggressively."
|
| That's rather rude considering the man was wheelchair bound,
| don't you think?
| jethkl wrote:
| No. "pedaling!=peddling".
| cge wrote:
| Hawking was perhaps unusual in being both a very accomplished
| physicist and a very accomplished physics communicator,
| explaining the concepts of modern physics to the public. Sagan, I
| think, was neither a particularly accomplished scientist, nor
| seriously claimed or tried to be, unlike some modern science
| communicators, but was enormously accomplished in bringing
| science to the public. Many accomplished scientists would
| likewise be terrible communicating ideas to the public, and make
| little attempt to. Hawking was not Einstein, or Newton, but to
| argue that he did not make major contributions to research does
| not seem reasonable; nor is it reasonable to dismiss someone's
| contributions by comparing them to the most prominent
| contributors over multiple centuries.
|
| But Hawking did perhaps shift focus gradually from one to the
| other. It is hard to do research while also devoting so much time
| and effort explaining science to the public, and it is perhaps
| hard to maintain a serious scholarly perspective while focusing
| on simplifying concepts and explanations for a general audience.
| The fame itself can be an impediment, too. I can recall one
| scientist, somewhat famous for what was then somewhat of a side
| project, who noted with some annoyance that whenever he posted
| something on arXiv, it would be leapt upon by journalists who
| would contact him and the university asking about the paper's
| connection to the topic, when, of course, it had nothing to do
| with that. The authors of the Wikipedia article on _The large-
| scale structure of space-time_ , meanwhile, find it necessary to
| repeatedly note that is not for a general audience, something not
| done for something like the phone book / MTW. The reviewer
| disagrees with the author on _when_ Hawking stopped making
| significant contributions to science, but I think it can be
| generally agreed that he did, at some point, while still making
| major contributions to the popularity and public understanding of
| physics.
|
| I can remember one of my earlier experiences as a graduate
| student was going to what may have been one of Hawking's last
| research talks, in the mid-2000s. The group had to leave that
| week's meeting off the public departmental calendar that usually
| listed our seminar, lest the public swarm our small seminar room.
| He gave what remains, to this day, one of the most awkward and
| embarrassingly bad research talks I have ever been to. It
| entirely lacked rigour and seemed to make little sense at all. It
| almost felt like a talk an amateur fan of his would give about
| ideas they devised after reading his popular books. The sole
| question, from a prominent physicist whose name would likely be
| recognized here, but not to the public, was brutal, somewhat off-
| handedly dismissing the entire premise of the talk from basic
| physics considerations. Hawking's only response was to say that
| the questioner's argument might be right.
|
| Sadly, as the reviewer suggests, it may be that Hawking _needed_
| to shift his focus to popularizing science and courting the media
| in order to afford the care that would allow him to continue to
| live decently. It may not have been what he would have preferred.
| There _are_ prominent scholars who continue to make significant
| contributions to research despite their age, who continue to be
| part of the scholarly conversation. The saddest part of the talk,
| when I thought about it later, was the sense that he seemed to
| almost be pleading with the audience to still be a participant in
| that conversation. He was an old friend of some of the faculty in
| the room. He had likely been one of the inspirations to more
| students in the room than just me, having read his popular works
| as a child and _The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time_ a bit
| later. But I think it was clear to everyone that he was no longer
| part of the conversation. In science, at least, the name died
| before the man. Better it died, I think, by him moving into
| popularizing science than him moving into dubious quantum claims.
|
| After that seminar, he gave his public talks on campus, attended
| by enormous crowds; while he often returned to our campus, I
| don't recall him giving research talks again.
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