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ORIGINAL: Shroomy726

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ORIGINAL: Ricardo
Oddly however, I don’t feel his overall contribution to physics all that significant, relatively speaking, compared to others I had learned about.

I hear a lot of people say this lately. I guess we will only know how significant his contribution is once it is proven experimentally, if ever. Took a while to prove gravitational waves through experimental data so who knows how long it will take to prove something even harder to measure.

I also hear people say "he couldn't have done it without others". Regarding his cooperation with other scientists, I actually believe that physics is getting so complex that one mind can't single-handedly conceive all of its answers. The biggest chance we have to truly achieve a complete understanding of the universe is by global cooperation. Hawking knew this and seemed to want to expose the world to science as much as he could. He was one of the first to attempt to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity from what I know. To discount some of his contributions by stating that he would not have done it without the others seems unfair to me.

Perhaps only the likes of Einstein or Newton would be contenders to tackle it by themselves by studying everything that has been proven and discovered since their lifetimes. But even they would probably admit that's a tall order.

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Oddly however, I don’t feel his overall contribution to physics all that significant, relatively speaking, compared to others I had learned about.

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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.

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Anyways, I just don't know if there's a clear pre-Hawking and post-Hawking in physics.

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ORIGINAL: estebanana
I prefer Stephen Jay Gould to any

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Oh God! I tried reading his final opus and rapidly gave up when all I could see in there was "Me! Me! Me! Me!".