> A Brief History of Time secured his celebrity. That it famously went unread, or unfinished, by many of its purchasers would for any other science communicator be a sign of failure. The book was like a Latin liturgy, filled with terms like the readership only half-understood. It played into the unhelpful notion that science is really hard and only for super-humans like him.<p>Lol, I must have been such a freak of a kid. I found this book in the library when I was 11yo and read it in a couple of weeks.<p>Couldn't do it these days. We didn't have internet back then.
The article doesn't really provide any evidence that he was 'deifyed'<p>The opening section quotes an anecdote about Hawking referring to his chances of winning a Nobel:<p>"Most doubtless saw this as an example of Hawking’s famous wit. But in truth it gives a clue to the physicist’s elusive character: shamelessly self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think."<p>Or, more likely, given the context - he was actually being funny and poking fun at his own reputation, as it appears.
> But I was struck by how unusual it was for a scientist to state publicly that their work warranted a Nobel.<p>Did he say he wanted a Nobel? To me it sounded like he made a joke.<p>> “People have searched for mini black holes… but have so far not found any,” he intoned with his trademark voice synthesiser. “This is a pity, because if they had I would have got a Nobel Prize.”<p>It shows a certain lack of context awareness to mark a guy down for vanity when he's spent most of his adult life in a wheel chair living a life that exists only in the mental sphere, with no prospects for physical release ever until the day he dies.
The most interesting hypothesis, bordering on conspiracy theory, I've heard about Hawking recently is that by 2000 or shortly after, his communication bandwidth was so low that it's impossible to know if virtually all his more complex communication, lectures, etc. were scripted by those in his inner circle.<p>Suggesting that famous people traded on his name may not go far enough. Was Hawking, post-~2000, merely a vehicle through which his inner circle of students/collaborators/children got access to an audience?<p>Who had access to his voice synthesizer, and could it could be overridden remotely? Hardly anything he said would have been "live" other than simple yes/no answers or, in less formal contexts where people would wait for them, short phrases. His talks were certainly not live communication; they were pre-written (raising the question, by whom?) even if nobody was using him as a puppet in realtime. At what point did <i>any</i> of it, any of his interactions, stop being live or genuine? Who would know about and reveal any unethical behavior, especially if it meant revealing their own abuse of access to gain an audience for their own work or interests?
Chip away at cosmological problems in your lab for decades, and you're an ivory tower scientist with no understanding of the world. Talk to the masses and popularize what you are working on, and you're an idol deified by hawkers.<p>Well, can't please everyone.
Maybe I'm jaded from stories I've heard of academics behaving badly. Scientists have been sniping at each other inside and across their disciplines longer than there's been science. I didn't assume he was any different and I don't know why anyone would.<p>Maybe he capitalized on the brand a bit more than others, but I can't find a standard to hold him to. How can I say how I'd act in his shoes when I would fight to my last breath just to not be in his shoes?<p>Maybe we do need "to judge" as the reviewer says, but I don't have the stomach for it. I guess it's "thanks and good job" to the people who do?<p>The editor dropped the ball by not titling the review "Hawking Hawking Hawking". I also got a pop-over to subscribe, which puts us at "Hawking Hawking Hawking Hawking".
Hawking spent over five decades surfing on a wave of technology that just barely held back a disease that could have buried him at any time. If self-promotion helped him stay on that wave, I don't begrudge one bit of it. After all, it's not like he was selling a bill of goods: he delivered.
Behold the three horsemen of scientism: Stephen Hawking, Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson! Consume your weekly science sermon from The Big Bang Theory and join the "I Fucking Love Science" worship group on Facebook!<p>It's all very silly really, and clearly a projection of dogmatic belief in religious authority onto science as some kind of monolithic book of knowledge rather than the rickety, slowly-less-wrong process that it is.
Hawking wasn't deified, he was a celebrity and anybody who accomplished what he had under his health conditions would be a celebrity anyway. His story was about succeeding in a field against all odds, not giving up and being positive. We love that kind of story.<p>Amongst the physicists, Einstein is deified as the epitome of human intellect. He is perceived as such because he had the ability to explain extremely complex subjects with layman's terms. But even Einstein would have been just a minor celebrity if he wasn't a jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany. We can observe that his popularity was a project because Einstein didn't have the character of a showman.<p>I bet if Feynman fled the Nazis and came to USA, we would have a real deity!