Book Review | Stephen Hawking was a saint of science and was considered immensely intelligent – but why him?

Biography

Charles Seife: Hawking on a Thigh: Selling a Science Celebrity (Hawking Hawking). Kimmo Pietiläinen, Finland. Terra Cognita. 457 s.

The man is sitting in a wheelchair with a red football scarf around his neck and moving his cheek muscles. A steady voice analyzes the chances of the England national football team at the World Cup in the background. The room has chalkboards with drawn formulas.

This is an ad from the gambling company Paddy Power from 2014, one physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawkingin (1942–2018) most special public appearances.

About how Hawking ended up advertising gambling, says the science reporter Charles Seifen an excellent, freshly translated book Hawking on a Thrush: Selling a Science Celebrity.

Hawking did ad apparently because he needed money to treat his illness. Hawking, who suffers from motion sickness ALS, was almost completely immobile for the past decades and needed round-the-clock treatment.

The new biography intertwines the stories of a successful researcher and the mega-celebrity of science.

Like good researcher biographies too Hawking on the thigh opens up the processes of science, how the sausage is born. There is controversy, competition, resentment, contempt, coincidences found by chance, and attempts at stabbing.

Hawking was not always a fair and pleasant colleague. According to Seife, among other things, he made unfounded allegations of plagiarism against other researchers.

Hawking on the thigh there is still no book of revelation or attack. The Finnish name – in English is a great pun: Hawking Hawking – gives an overly aggressive picture of the book.

The safe speaks extensively and respectfully about the scientific merits of its subject. In the 1970s, Hawking, as a young man, made important breakthroughs in the study of black holes. He tried to reconcile awkward theories.

He raised the profile of cosmology. His relentlessness inspires people.

Book format is peculiar. The story begins at the funeral and goes back to birth.

A type of biography if one needs form experiments. At times, however, it is tricky to read about the scientific debates whose underlying discoveries will only be made in the following chapters, decades earlier.

Professor Hawking did not, after the 1980s, really produce new ideas in physics, although he did good research.

The actual world reputation was brought to the general public by writing A short history of time (1988). It was a rare millionaire success.

The safe says, that the manuscript originally submitted by Hawking was not very strange and that the book was edited into a bestselling force by several people.

On the other hand, the safe also thinks that A short history of time missed many because it was still not a very digestible text in the end.

According to one theory, the book was brought to great popularity by the original cover. It features wheelchair-accessible hawking and a starry sky. At the time, it was very rare to see writers on the front pages of nonfiction books.

Whatever the reason, the British Stephen Hawking was the most famous scientist in the world for the last 30 years or so.

You appealed to the people the contrast, real or not, between Hawking’s spirit and body. Comparisons were often made of the kind that his thoughts and imagination flew high while his body was tied to a chair.

“The intellect liberated from the body,” as an anthropologist Hélène Mialet analyzes the image. Where can I go from: Could Stephen Hawking have been a woman? Could a woman rise above her body in a similar way to pure sanity?

Perhaps the old idea of ​​sacrifice also contributed to popularity: a person gets something when something is taken away. Hawking’s inability to exercise was perceived to be the price of genius, much like the blindness of a blind sage.

I think many people like this way of thinking because it makes your own habit feel better.

Hawking ended to the dilemma: on the one hand, he wanted to appear in public precisely as a researcher, not as a disabled person, on the other hand, the vastly respectful publicity he received would never have arisen without ALS.

The safe, I think, underestimates one more reason for Hawking’s appreciation, namely his voice formation. Until the mid-1980s, Hawking spoke only with the help of a speech synthesizer. In the final stages, he moved his cheek, and the computer turned the movements into words and then speech.

The production of speech was very slow. So all of Hawking’s TV interviews, lectures, and answers to lecture audience questions were pre-written.

He didn’t flaunt his words in public and didn’t think about anything live. He always sounded confident and ready to speak. It brought scientific authority.

Synthetic sentences sounded a bit like robot or computer speech. There was little emotion or personality involved. Therefore, the voice represented pure rationality.

Impressed of course also the science of Hawking. Expertise on the universe makes scientists particularly wise and interesting in the eyes of the public.

In a similar way Kari Enqvist, Esko Valtaoja and Autumn Räsänen appear in public to characters with exceptional intelligence and understanding. If they studied the sociology of food or the nuances of the meaning of Finnish words, they would hardly be as well known.

One reason is that we speak Finnish and eat food every day. They are present to us differently than space, infinity, and the essence of the universe.

Many have sometimes wondered how the universe originated or what is behind the stars. The questions may have aroused wonder, not their own opinions, such as food and language.

The intellectual star dust of cosmology would rain abundantly on Hawking. He was often called one of the smartest people of our time.

And it is true that the research done by Hawking required exceptionally difficult and intuitive thinking. The book’s descriptions of Hawking’s work are well written but frustrating to the layman because of the difficult subject matter.

By the 1990s, Hawking was already starting to be on the sidelines of research, which, of course, was not at all reflected in his portrayal. The audience did not know when Hawking presented views that were different from the mainstream and when they did not.

Famous scholars easily appear in the media to be representatives of their entire discipline, although there may be a raging debate within the discipline.

Towards the end of his career Hawking aroused irritation in his colleagues after commenting on, for example, artificial intelligence or the encounter of civilizations in outer space. Many deserving scholars felt that Hawking was not an expert on the subject and that his views seemed more significant to the public than they were.

You can read more about this topic from here.

This is a problem for respected researchers – or, from another point of view, a privilege. Their authority smuggles weight even when the conversation moves out of its area of ​​expertise.

Hawking, however, remained quite close to his field of research and did not begin to present his thoughts more broadly, even on economics or folk poetry.

No doubt he would have been listened to even then. The abilities brought about by exceptional intelligence are still believed too much. The Finnish media also easily assumes that an intelligent person makes intelligent comments about an issue because of his or her brilliant intelligence alone.

The assumption is especially evident in discussion programs and columns. In reality, good things come about by finding out and thinking hard.

When someone in public talks about a subject about knowing far too little, it is by far more often a man than a woman – albeit an even more frequent male journalist than a male researcher. Our culture communicates unnecessarily strongly to smart men that their thoughts are valuable just because they hit their heads.

In the world of science Hawking, of course, was not as respected as in the media.

In 1999, Physics World surveyed 250 physicists around the world who are the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein won by 119 votes. Newton was second with 96 votes. Hawking got one vote. There were many names unknown to the general public.

Hawking never even won the Nobel Prize. You can read more about this topic from here.

But what then? Publicity is not, and should not be, a reward based on achievement. Global media, in particular, has its own sphere.

Stephen Hawking did his work as a symbolic figure of knowledge and a saint of science skillfully and appealingly.