On Hawking

As I hoped she would, Sabine Hossenfelder has a post up looking at the scientific legacy of Stephen Hawking, and it's larger than I would have guessed.    Roger Penrose's great obituary in The Guardian is the other essential read.

As it happens, I was going to post last week about the last bit of media attention he was getting::

Hawking's answer to the question "What was there before there was anything?" relies on a theory known as the "no-boundary proposal."...

According to TechTimes, Hawking says during the show that before the Big Bang, time was bent — "It was always reaching closer to nothing but didn't become nothing," according to the article. Essentially, "there was never a Big Bang that produced something from nothing. It just seemed that way from mankind's point of perspective."

In in a lecture on the no-boundary proposal, Hawking wrote: "Events before the Big Bang are simply not defined, because there's no way one could measure what happened at them. Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory, and say that time began at the Big Bang."

This isn't the first time Hawking has discussed this theory. He previously delivered lectures on the topic and starred in a free documentary about it, available on YouTube.

I think it's worth noting that Hawking himself didn't really believe his own PR, or perhaps to be more kind, the PR sometimes foisted upon him.  I posted a link in 2014 to this article - Hawking: Is he all he is cracked up to be?  and it still seems a fair take.   I suppose one may question why he was happy to insert himself into popular TV shows that pandered to an inflated view of his scientific importance, but I would presume it was well intentioned to help give science itself a high and "cool" cultural profile.  And probably fun for him too, and it would seem churlish to complain about what a person with such disability should do for a bit of amusement. 

Finally, I just stumbled across this talk his gave on his website:  Godel and the End of Physics.

It's aimed at a general audience, and was delivered in 2002, but I don't recall reading it before.  It's pretty good, although I don't know if he subsequently modified his views later. Certainly, Peter Woit, while not dissing him, regrets that Hawking did start promoting a multiverse view which Woit has spent years arguing is not really scientific.

Update:   I don't really want this to be the "final word" on the post, but I just can't help illustrating again the spectacular way in which a middle aged, conservative Catholic former blogger doesn't know what he doesn't know: