
Steve Boxall, steveboxall.com
Which is pretty much how popular media treated him:
Yes, he was brilliant. And who could not be inspired by his rising above such a debilitating physical condition that left him wheelchair-bound for decades? But there are other factors to consider.
Many underestimate the place that science holds in today’s cultural backdrop. In pre-modern Christendom, the ultimate statement of authority was “Thus saith the Lord.” Today, the closest statement with that sort of gravitas is “the science is settled,” despite how often that claim is misused to stifle debate and advance ideologies.
And also, Stephen Hawking didn’t stay in his lane. He was a scientist, but in each of his books and nearly all of his media appearances, he ventured into philosophy, masking metaphysical observations and proclamations in
language of scientific certainty. John Stonestreet, “Scientism vs. Revelation & the Limits of Knowledge” at Salvo
Yes, he was careful to do science and leave the crackpot cosmology for the long-anticipated dessert. The media loved it because gullible notables loved it.
The comparatively unknown Sabine Hossenfelder is a much more reliable guide to what makes sense and nonsense in theoretical physics. But that’s why she is a comparatively unknown freelance physicist.
Top People need a multiverse. The rewards go to those who can conjure one. Hawking did his best within the boundaries of science and is to be commended for going no further. We have heard and will hear plenty from those who show no such qualms.
Something to watch: Will Stephen Hawking still be compared to Einstein and Newton 25 years from now?
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See also: Stephen Hawking’s final paper, just released, tacked the information paradox
and
Seeing that he accepted evolutionism, I doubt his intelligence.
Anyone who believes that General Relativity permits time travel in any direction is not smart but stupid, IMO. Truth is, as Karl Popper wrote in Conjectures and Refutations, Einstein’s spacetime is a block universe in which nothing happens. Hawking, along with his time-travel-through-wormhole friend, Kip Thorne (2018 Nobel Prize for discovering non-existent gravitational waves), will one day be listed prominently in the Book of the World’s Fakest and Most Worthless Scientists.
It is interesting to point out that Hawking’s main claim to scientific fame actually supported Theism rather than atheism. As a team in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and George Ellis were instrumental in refining General Relativity to a point to reveal that not only did mass-energy have a absolute (singular) beginning in the Big Bang, but according to the predictions of General Relativity space-time itself also had an absolute (singular) beginning that corresponded to the origin of matter and energy:
The Theistic implications of the absolute (singular) beginning for space-time, matter-energy are fairly obvious.
Hawking, as an atheist, tried to find a ‘work-around’ for the absolute singular beginning of the entire universe. But as William lane Craig points out in the following video, Hawking’s model still implies, despite misconceptions, an absolute beginning for the universe.
Rob Sheldon referred to Hawking’s attempted ‘work-around’ model as “lipstick on the pig”
Thus, despite Hawking’s failed attempts to blunt the Theistic implications of what his original work on General Relativity suggested, i.e. an absolute beginning for the universe, Hawking’s greatest contribution to science itself still, far from supporting Hawking’s atheism, actually offers one of the most powerful scientific evidences for Theism.
Rob Sheldon is not alone in his criticism of Hawking’s work subsequent to his initial work on General Relativity. Roger Penrose himself, Hawking’s collaborator in the 1970’s. called Hawkings book “The Grand Design” (where Hawking tried to find a mathematical ‘theory of everything’), “It’s a collection of ideas, hopes, aspirations. It’s not even a theory,,,”
Another beef I had with Hawking is that Hawking, via the Copernican principle, once stated that “The human race is just a chemical scum”
Yet Hawking’s own field of expertise, i.e. General Relativity, has now overturned the Copernican Principle:
Einstein himself stated, The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS [coordinate systems].”
Fred Hoyle and George Ellis add their considerable weight here in these following two quotes:
Even Stephen Hawking himself, who I remind claimed that we are just chemical scum on an insignificant planet, stated that it is not true that Copernicus proved Ptolemy wrong,,, the real advantage of the Copernican system is simply that the equations of motion are much simpler in the frame of reference in which the sun is at rest.”
And even more directly contrary to Hawking’s claim that we are just chemical scum, even individual people can be considered to be central in the universe according to the four-dimensional space-time of General Relativity,,,
Moreover, Quantum Mechanics itself, which Hawking was also certainly well versed in, overturns the Copernican Priciple even more forcefully than General Relativity does. As the following article states, “It proves that measurement is everything. At the quantum level, reality does not exist if you are not looking at it,”
Because of such experiments as this from Quantum Mechanics, Richard Conn Henry stated, “It is more than 80 years since the discovery of quantum mechanics gave us the most fundamental insight ever into our nature: the overturning of the Copernican Revolution, and the restoration of us human beings to centrality in the Universe.”
Thus, although Hawking certainly did great scientific work with his initial work on General Relativity in extending it to include an absolute beginning for space-time, I am certainly less than enamored with much of his subsequent work after that initial work. Certainly a high amount of honor is due him, but I can’t help thinking that Hawking’s almost cult like stature in science was overblown in regards to what he actually accomplished, and especially in regards to what he overlooked in his subsequent work because of his a-priori atheistic bias.
I wonder how much further he would have gone in science had he not been blinded by his atheism?