381–390 of 468 posts
“What do Sheldon Cooper and a black hole have in common?” Hawking asked the fictional Caltech physicist whose IQ comfortably outstrips his social skills. After a pause, the answer came: “They both suck.” Stephen's sense of humor has always cracked me up.
He made so many cameos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking_in_popular_cul... and was on not only The Simpsons, but Futurama as well!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At 76, I think it's fair to say he just died. I actually had no idea he was that old. Maybe he looked younger than he was because he had no wrinkles.
Nobody "just dies". Most "natural deaths" are still heart failure. The rest are other kinds of organ failure. For a lot of people that die natural deaths they could have lived longer if they had kept fit. It just gets really hard to either do or justify when everything hurts and gets harder to do year over year. Or when you are confined to a wheelchair since your early 20s, were told you would only live two years, an…
Not one negative comment in this whole thread. Everyone is enamoured with Hawking, huh? Ask the women in his life what they thought of him. Ask the scientists, including Peter Higgs, who complained about his undue credibility and attention given to him. Disagree with me? Think I'm speaking negative about the dead? If you call yourself inspired by a scientist, admiring a scientist, then you should seek the truth. Emot…
As evidenced by this thread - he was inspirational, and I appreciate that so many people here got that from him. And, yeah, I've heard a number of stories about how he treated women and his first wife that are just disturbing and sadly completely unsurprising, given the norms of our society (that are thankfully being shaken and revisited at this stage of human development, it would seem). This made me lose a lot of respect for him.
It started when I was a grad student in physics at U.C. Berkeley, he came and gave a lecture. He ended it with a tasteless sexual joke / pun, the kind that you would hear from a clueless teenage boy. I was really thrown off by that.
He was a great man, and a true inspiration to all of us. May he rest in peace. It's weird now, because I feel like the generation of physicists who were able to get close to people and think about the really important problems, is simply gone.
His death reminded me how much enthusiastic I was about the origin(s) of the universe and such fundamental questions. But like many others, I couldn't find my way in science and am now millions of miles away from that. Maybe everyone has a path (destiny) and mine wasn't in science.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neil Degrasse Tyson is clearly vying for the slot but seems to make science seem more elitist, more pedantic (read literally any of his tweets) and thus appears to miss the point entirely
I feel like this might have more to do with modern social media and celebrity culture, especially Twitter culture, than with Tyson himself. It's toxic. It's really hard to move in that realm with out adopting some of its sensibilities and tone. In Tyson's defense, the new Cosmos was damn near perfect and had none of the elitism that I detected. Just a love of knowledge and history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I feel like he started off great but as he grew more famous has made it very much all about himself.
Similar issue with Bill Nye, I think, though he's definitely not on the same level.
It's just hard to take him seriously as a science spokesman.
Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so…
Did anyone start reading this comment expecting the usual downvotes and controversy? And then realized after a few paragraphs that this is Stephen Hawking writing it? Be honest. I just think there has been such a transition from books to online comments and forums that everything is picked apart and commented by a far larger group of people than in the past. The man was a legend. His books were inspiring. Can today's…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neil Degrasse Tyson is clearly vying for the slot but seems to make science seem more elitist, more pedantic (read literally any of his tweets) and thus appears to miss the point entirely
I feel like this might have more to do with modern social media and celebrity culture, especially Twitter culture, than with Tyson himself. It's toxic. It's really hard to move in that realm with out adopting some of its sensibilities and tone. In Tyson's defense, the new Cosmos was damn near perfect and had none of the elitism that I detected. Just a love of knowledge and history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree completely. Who will take his place? Who will be the Stephen Hawking of my children's generation? As a society we should work hard to find, celebrate and give a platform to the Stephen Hawking-s and the Carl Sagan-s of tomorrow. The impact of such "celebrity scientists" (I do not use that term pejoratively) is far greater than the measure of the work they have done. It is how they inspire an entire generation…
What the world needs now is someone in that role for climate change who can capture an interpretation of that body of science the way that Hawking and Sagan captured the public attention around the big bang and other highly complex abstract concepts in the physics of Astronomy & Cosmology.
I mean, I'm a lukewarmist, not a denier, but since the 90s people have been saying "science advocacy" when they mean "advocacy for my politics". Everyone's (correctly) for Darwinism and contra modern creationism but no one seems to be in favor of IQ advocacy.
And I mean advocacy for the low IQ cohorts that are being technologied out of a social role. But hey, you would have to admit IQ exists.