Overhyped Physicists: Stephen Hawking, the Abused Celebrity

Steven Hawking was certainly a brilliant mind, though his contributions to fundamental physics cannot be compared to a Newton or Dirac. The marketing of the brand "Hawking" then prompts some questions...

[Domigud]

I must say, I severely admire your courage to question them like this.

[OldSloGuy]

Most physics research depends on political charity. The big problem is the distribution of funding by grants. There is also information hiding. For example, for a long time our government supressed research on quaternions, If someone did original research on quaternions for a masters thesis, the government made sure it did not get indexed. In their hubris, they were sure the Soviets couldn't figure out the trajectories for ICBMs if we didn't talk about quaternions in the literature. If you find one of these rare papers, the bibliography will likely have only Hamilton's original paper and a few more no later than 1950. They stopped this when our own people started dying due to guidance computer failures on interceptors that would maneuver through the pole of the local coordinate system, generate a divide by zero error and reboot. Intercept failed, people died. Eventually, they realized that the Soviets had figured things out a long time ago and we were just shooting ourselves in the foot. The equivalent of friendly fire.

[vikidprinciples]

I knew someone, college friend, who went into theoretical physics and knew Hawking. Said he was overhyped also.

[Togidubnus]

I agree with absolutely every word of this, and I applaud you for producing it. I've only recently found your channel, and you seem to be on exactly the right track about most everyone else being on the wrong track.

[julioc.]

Wow this was an eye opener for me (a non physicist but interested in popular physics books -those without a formula-) thanks herr doktor.

[ankidokolo]

It's called theoretical Physics, and it means that you can play with equations to see what the math tells you, exactly what you did in the Schwarzschield radius and mass dependence here.
So yes it's still physics as long as you're consistent with the rules.

Just say that you yourself didn't understand it, so it's not good for you.

[every]

The lure of celebrity seems too tempting to resist for many of these people and their agents. It seems also that almost all their fans have no idea what they're talking about.

[STRAGGLER]

Thank you for expressing so clearly and concisely my same objections. I am glad to have somebody who can articulate them far better and more briefly than I.

[rayfleming]

Hawking and the others are among the popular physicists who did not get a single piece of original research right. Thanks for another great video.

[dehilster]

Absolutely agree with you. Unfortunately there are even worse people out there: “science evangelists”.

[pandzban]

I read a 'A Brief History of Time' 30 years ago as a teenager. Years before academic studies. To that time I had all my plans pointed at astrophysics. After having read that book I quit all my plans and change to biology, chemistry and environmental science in general. Sorry guys, there is no content in this book. I realized, it is peculiar field of science with no logic inside. It took me over 20 years to come back but I did it when such people Like Unzicker and many others show up in my life. There is one important rule in modern world. The more the topic is talked about the less valuable it is.

[ClarkPotter]

It's anthropocentric to immediately demand that a mathematical model be testable by us meat sacks at the present time. The ToE when it arises will most likely look impossibly highfalutin to the uninitiated. It will look like a string theory or some such. It's a nice ideal to have things be testable but we may just have to wait on some big developments to reach that point. To criticize a model like string theory for "having no basis in reality" is anthropocentric because we can only approach knowledge of absolute reality from the limited vantage of our corner of apprehension. Our minds, however, aren't always so tethered to immediate experience, which is how we get developments like relativity and QM in the first place. Do you think both of those models received the criticism that, "they have no basis in reality" when they came out? I'll bet they did.

We may get to a point that "testing" a theory or model might take the form of running it as a simulation on a computer or quantum computer, and seeing if that model generates something resembling our observable universe.

[dirremoire]

The fact that the M87 black hole looks like every artist's conception I've ever seen, leads me to be highly suspicious of the photo.

[roberttheiss]

Really enjoying the lectures. Savage but true, but in his defense, really nobody has contributed much of anything in the past 80 years compared to the founding physicists.

[junacebedo]

Hawking said Philosophy is dead, but he kept on philosophizing

[vincent]

creepy - can you imagine being locked-in like Hawking and have someone abuse you routinely while being completely helpless to stop it. You couldnt even reach out to others without her carting you away or unplugging your voicebox

[doubleslit]

WOW! He said the quiet part out loud; where everyone could hear it. Someone tell him “that’s not polite.“.

I often wondered if Hawkins’’ peer group secretly resented the seemingly disproportionate press to accomplishment ratio Stephen Hawkins’ received. It’s actually refreshing to hear someone saying this out loud while still maintaining respect. Yes of course Hawkins was a genius who contributed to the body physics but he did so while suffering an incredibly debilitating & progressive disease. Therefore his celebrity is a function of what he overcame to make those contributions rather than the size of those contributions themselves.

[NightWanderer]

This video shows a complete misunderstanding of what a black hole is. A black hole isn't defined as a material object with a given density; rather, it is defined (loosely speaking) as a region whose radius is less than or equal to its Schwarzschild radius. In this regard, the Schwarzschild radius of the observable Universe is in fact smaller than its radius. So the claims about black holes made here aren't valid criticisms.

[heraclitusblacking]

I just discovered this channel and am loving it so far.

[wdobni]

the sanctification of hawking was the result of the fact that SO LITTLE was/is happening in physics that is new, novel, or engaging....physics is an impoverished discipline and hawking was probably the last and most recent physicist in the past 75 years to actually have a genuinely new idea, namely the black hole