Prospect Magazine: “The mind of God? The problem with deifying Stephen Hawking”

Hawking did not really produce any important scientific work after A Brief History; a decade later he was left behind by a new generation of theoretical physicists. Towards the end of his career, he would float half-baked but attention-grabbing ideas. In 2004, he announced that he’d solved a major problem in theoretical physics—the black hole information paradox. But all he’d done was to finally convince himself of what many others already believed: that he’d been wrong to think information was erased by black holes.

Hawking adopted the habit of very publicly placing financial bets on scientific debates, knowing that this would create a news hook whatever the outcome. When, in 2012, he bet against the discovery of the Higgs particle at the LHC, it wasn’t because of any strong theoretical argument but because it inserted him into a story in which he’d played no part. Sure enough, the Daily Telegraph ran the headline: “Higgs Boson: Prof Stephen Hawking Loses $100 Bet”. Peter Higgs, the media-shy physicist who had (with others) suggested the particle’s existence decades earlier, wasn’t amused. Hawking’s celebrity status, he said, meant he got away with pronouncements in a way that other people would not. Hawking muscled in on the act too when gravitational waves were detected in late 2015, saying that the detections agree with predictions that I and other scientists have made about black holes. Maybe—but it was mostly (as the Nobel citation the following year showed) the other scientists.

Philip Ball

I have always been puzzled by the amount of attention and reverence Stephen Hawking was getting in scientific publications, considering his comparatively small contribution. His one truly original result is the black-body radiation – and no, I would not consider writing popular books an important contribution to science. I would not call him overrated, but he was definitely overhyped, and willingly contributed to his celebrity status with provocative statements in domains where he had little expertise.

Photo: Esiree Martin/AFP via Getty Images

As the article correctly points out, the issue was as much with his actions as it is with our society. We are too quick to put people on pedestals, while ignoring their glaring flaws – examples abound in the tech and business world, from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk. People like clinging to unlikely success stories because it validates their hope than somehow, someday, they too may become successful; people seem to think than if they admire the rich and famous (or in this case smart and resilient) enough then these qualities might magically rub off on them. Even more problematic is how individuals become celebrities not necessarily proportional to their contribution to society or mastery of their field, but because of unrelated attributes such as charisma or extraversion.