Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity

Re:Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by ObscureScience on Saturday March 12, 2022 @09:38AM (#30651657)

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.

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Re:Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by ThinkBeat on Saturday March 12, 2022 @10:03AM (#30651834)

According to the book "When Einstein Walked with Gödel" Einstein was not comfortable with all the attention and adoration he was receiving.

One of the reason Einstein and Gödel 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.

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Re:Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by wrycoder on Saturday March 12, 2022 @04:30PM (#30655062)

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 Gödel"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del

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Re:Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by hirundo on Saturday March 12, 2022 @09:56AM (#30651783)

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.

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Re:Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity by qchris on Saturday March 12, 2022 @12:50PM (#30653198)

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.

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