Paul Magnussen -> RE: RIP Stephen Hawking (Mar. 21 2018 21:01:26)
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quote:
Oddly however, I don’t feel his overall contribution to physics all that significant, relatively speaking, compared to others I had learned about. You’re not alone in that opinion. In Genius* (p. 40), Hans Eysenck remarks: quote:
A good example of how important irrelevant considerations may be is the status Stephen Hawking, whose sad disability has captured the public imagination […], and has propelled his poorly written popular A Brief History of Time into the best-seller list. It also identified him in the popular mind as a ‘genius’, which is patently over the top; he is an outstanding mathematical physicist, equal perhaps to Hoyle; first-rate, but no genius. To give but one instance of how the label of ‘originality’ or ‘creativity’ can accrue to the wrong person, consider his early stance in denying that the surface area of a black hole is actually a measure of entropy; if true, that would mean that a black hole had a temperature, defined in terms of its surface area. Now anything that has a temperature must radiate energy, and therefore cannot be a black hole! A young Californian research assistant called Jakob Bekenstein suggested, in a series of publications, just that: the surface area of a black hole was, indeed, a measure of entropy, and black holes do have temperatures related to their surface area. Furious, Hawking attacked Bekenstein’s interpretation of the equation Hawking had originally published. Later, Hawking paid a visit to Moscow and learned about the work of Yakov Zel’dovich on the way black holes interact with light. He became convinced that black holes must indeed emit radiation, and did have temperatures! He completely changed course, and advocated what earlier he had condemned, and now ‘Hawking radiation’ is considered one of the great achievements of the past 50 years of physics, combining as it does general relativity and quantum mechanics in one package. Poor Bekenstein, the original discoverer, is forgotten. *https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Creativity-Problems-Behavioural-Sciences/dp/0521485088/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1521669480&sr=1-1&keywords=hans+eysenck+genius
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