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Stephen Hawking on The Future

Posted by Hemos on Fri Jan 07, 2000 07:04 AM
from the and-it-came-through-his-box dept.
Science
RalfM writes "As far as people worth listening to go, Stephen Hawking is right up there. Some newspapers are currently presenting a rare interview with him about the future. Points mentioned include Marylin Monroe, off-planet migration, DNA reprogramming, limits to human brain processing ("We can be quick-witted or very intelligent, but not both.") and more. "
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  • Ibanix, please read this.... (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    listen carefully.

    In evolutionary terms, Hawking is "fit" because he has "what it takes" to survive.

    Fitness is not determined by rock hard abdominals or the ability to run a mile in under 6 minutes; and "survival of the fittest" does not mean that people who play varsity sports will populate the world of tomorrow. darwinian fitness != physical fitness

    get this through your #^%#ing thick skull: "survival of the fittest" can be restated as "survival of those entities, whom to their respective environments, are fitted best".

    In yet other words, if an animal has traits that allow it to survive, and it does survive (long enough to transmit those traits) then those traits continue to exist.

    now go to your church, where your pastor/minister/priest/whatever will explain to you that evil people like me are all parts of god's plan, and that you must have faith in His greatness, and that because the Bible clearly states that He created Everything, I am clearly wrong, and a sinner to boot. Please do the world a favor and stop looking both ways when you cross the street.

    a comment on the darwinian survival of religion: Religion is a fit meme because it is attractive to many types of people (those brainwashed since youth, or on death row, or just dumb). The mere fact that the majority beleives something does not make it true; this goes for god AND Darwin. If you really want to break your mind, read up on Geodel's theorem (its math). It basically says that no internally consistent system can be complete, ie, nothing can account for everything. :P

    there is no god, there is no truth, there is only opinion. Just because your opinion is that there IS a god and a truth, does not make it so; just as MY opinion that there is only opinion, does not make it so.

    The most absolute statement anyone can make is, "this I believe"; at least, that's what I believe. 8-P~~~

  • I don't know how Rob&Co. go about getting interviews with people but I think Mr. Hawking would be a perfect interview for Slashdot. Somebody in the Q&A with CmdrTaco and Hemos the other day mentioned a perceived lack of non-Linux/OSS/computer news recently and this would take care of that nicely. I know that he is a very busy man but this would be the perfect interview format for him I think, he wouldn't have to put up with some guy in his office all day, he'd just read the questions and type his responses back when he could.

    Any other interest?

  • It was also interesting that the interviewer made the implicit assumption that space travel was primarily a means to reduce terrestrial overpopulation!
    Given the failure rate that NASA has had, this might be a correct assumption! :^)

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
  • I think you're missing the point that Stephen Hawkings was trying to make. He said that;- ". If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time. We have not seen any tourists from the future. That means that..."

    But that assumes the implications of our current model of how the universe works is correct. His flow of logic here is "FTL implies time travel is possible, time travel means at some point the future equivalent of a script kiddie would have come back and wiped out civilization, therefore no time travel." But that assumes the "FTL implies time travel" statement is correct. It probably is, but I wouldn't state it (or *anything* in science) as gospel.
  • I think you mean Franklin Roosevelt. He was the one in the wheelchair.

    Teddy Roosevelt was very fit, though he did have bad eyesight, and consequently very thick glasses.

    Don Negro
  • No offence, but if you'd read the whole article you would have found out that this ad campaign brought in some 150,000 USD, which he needs to pay for his nursing care (10 full time nurses for a start).
  • Having worked fairly extensively with folks in a similar physical situation as Dr. Hawking, I can say it does take getting used to, and is very disconcerting at first. Once you do get a feel for the change in pacing and lack of standard physical expression, you wonder how you ever could have felt otherwise. I agree, though, that the author's wording could have been better chosen, but I appreciate the honesty and was glad to see a change of sorts by the end of the article.

  • To factor in Disease, Famine, and War, all of which increase in likelihood and virulence as the population rises.

  • I think he's singing along to Kraftwerk's 'Computerworld'...

  • His cleverness, intellect and ability to manipulate people and circumstances to his benifit show that he is clearly extremely 'fit' to survive. Survival doesn't neccessarily mean caving in the skull of the person next to you and stealing his food, although I can attest that, with a full charge, his wheelchair is more than capable of such a feat! Here is a man who, despite all physical odds, has managed to survive, reproduce and acquire and maintain social status. People, like all other forms of life, adapt to their environment in all sorts of successful ways, regardless of our expectations or assumptions.

  • I love him for his imagery and wordlplay most of all. Almost fairy-tale-ish at times. Timeless stuff.

    Hawking's predicament, with his multiple wives and staff of sassy nurses also brings to mind Heinlein. I almost envy the man!

  • Try having yourself duct-taped to a wheelchair which you can only navigate with your tongue and have to rely on another person for each and every interaction with your immediate environment, now matter how tiny or insignificant it may seem. See if you don't blow your top once and a while when your paid assistant wanders off. I'm not saying it's right, but it's understandable. I've seen similarly afflicted folks handle such situations with more grace, but I've also seen 'tantrums' over things that seem very unreasonable, until you look at exactly how much you and I take for granted. Chances are his assistant at the time was new and had to learn in no uncertain terms to ask/inform him before going off about her own business, however briefly.

    I'd like to see him act more gracefully, but I won't condemn him for doing otherwise. Same goes for the bridge. He may have waited in the past and found that traffic never slows enough to let him pass unhindered, so better to just be rude and jump right in.

    As for the papers and stealing, I have no idea of the veracity of this. I suppose, after he dies and biographies are written, the truth will come out one way or the other.

  • And kudos to his first wife for not pulling the plug at what surely seemed to be 'the final hour'.

  • ...is possible using an Alcubierre warp geometry [islandone.org] - something which is not possible for us but becomes trivial for any civilisation advanced enough to manupulate the distortion of spacetime in controlled ways. Basically by moving spacetime while the ship sits still (similar to the expansion of spacetime just after the big bang), you have no time-speedup, no temporal paradoxes, and no feeling of acceleration for the ship's crew.

    Other links:
    Unfortunately the paper itself has been taken down by Cardiff university, and I couldn't find it mirrored anywhere.
  • I have a friend who has her PHD in astro-physics (works as a high-power computer geek now, go figure) and who's ex is a professor and somewhat respected person in the field.

    When I first met them a few years ago, in one of our conversations, I asked if 'Brief History of Time' was considered basic theoretical physics theory.

    The answer suprised me. They told me that not only were most of the things in the book not considered basic theory, but many if not most of the ideas put forward as fact were highly controversial and hotly contested in the field of astro-physics.

    It seems that Hawking, while respected, well thought of, and certainly a smart cookie, is not the all-influential demigod that most of us believe that he is.

    He does get great press, though....

    jf
  • Nobody knows if intelligence is caused by the interaction of molecules. The phenomen of consciousness is still unexplained. IMHO consciousness is the reason for intelligence whereas interaction of molecules is only the symptom. I think it's the most fatal mistake of orthodox sience to completely ignore the role of consciousness.

    Nowhere was it stated that intelligence arose directly from the interaction between molecules; perhaps consciousness is an epiphenomenon of those interactions, and intelligence arises from that?

    The human race needs mental and physical improvement? That doesn't require genetic engeneering, just some common sense. Look at the educational system - it is designed to make you dumb. But, obviously, you cannot fix the educational system by genetic engeneering. Or just watch some television. Stupid talkshows everyday ( 90% about relationship problems ). And the list goes on and on...

    You're not thinking about the same sort of improvement as Stephen Hawking is. Just because you can't think outside the box (the word 'qualities' is a clue to the potential difference being qualitative) doesn't mean that "Hawking is obviously wrong".

    Does anybody really want this ? Growing babies outside of the body reminds of some alien species ;). I remember some claims saying that humans use only 10% of their brain/potential. Maybe learning how to use the remaining 90% should be considered more important than simply growing the brain ad infinitum.

    Plenty of species not alien to our environment grow babies outside their bodies. And can you not see the difference between using 10% of your brain and using 10% of your potential? Most importantly, what does your squeamishness have to do with whether or not "Hawking is obviously wrong"?

    Hamish
  • 1) It was not on the basis of personality that AC would give his lungs, but on scientific merit. If you had offered some examples of those whom you consider to be of greater scientific merit than Stephen Hawking, perhaps AC would make the same offer regarding those people.

    2) I can think of a few people who would come away from an interview with me thinking that I am a complete arsehole; I don't think that I am being excessively arrogant in thinking that this would reflect more heavily on them than on myself.

    3) Have you noticed that the person that became Stephen's second wife, which is brave even disregarding the slating that he got from the press over that separation, was a former nurse of his?

    Never having met the man, I cannot give you my own impressions of him. But I can tell you that the reason that he does not speak about his separation, which caused many people to form negative opinions about him (because he did not defend himself against the accusations brought against him by the press), is to protect his former wife.
  • I wanted meat, I wanted guts, I wanted science.

    You'd also need a degree in theoretical physics to understand it. Lets face it, the guy creates and destroys entire universes in his head. He's on another level to most of us. I consider myself lucky to live in the same city as he does, but if I ever got to meet him, I wouldn't have a clue what to ask him. Would you?

    "Some smegger's filled in this 'Have You Got A Good Memory?' quiz!"
  • The idea that relativity breaks down at light speed is nonsensical, because no object can ever reach light speed (in a simple way).

    This argument is nonsensical, because you're using relativity to prove that relativity doesn't break down. You also added the "in a simple way" disclaimer. I don't believe I claimed that FTL travel would be simple.

    Seriously, though, I'm familiar with everything you said, and am in no way implying that simply concocting a hotter burning rocket fuel could propel us at FTL velocities. That's a ridiculous notion.

    However, the existence of luxons would seem to invalidate the assumption that nothing can reach the speed of light. And as far as I know, nobody has yet been able to disprove the existence of tachyons. Assuming that they exist, then there must be a means of attaining FTL velocity, although such means would almost certainly be far more complex than normal acceleration. (Now if I could just figure out how to build a spaceship with imaginary mass, we'd be all set. :)

    Basically, all I'm saying is that since we have not made a lot of direct observations of massive objects travelling at or very near c, we can't know exactly what happens under these circumstances. Relativity makes predictions, but relativity is known to be an incomplete theory. Perhaps (probably, even) the predictions relativity makes regarding light speed travel are correct, but perhaps, just perhaps, the fact that relativity describes this as an impossible phenomenon simply implies that this is one of the limits of relativity.

    I'm not prepared to argue that FTL travel is definitely, absolutely, and unarguably attainable. I'm also not prepared to completely disregard the idea based on the predictions of a model that is know to be incomplete. Some of the greatest advances in science have come about because of the observation of phenomena that should not have been possible based on the current models of the time.
  • I'm actually rather pleased by the article for the exact reasons you mention. There have been a few shows here in the states that have had "interviews " with him and they've all come off without the long pauses. Having done a little bit of handicap access work for X Windows in the past, I couldn't figure out how he could get the apparent speed through the interface I figured he had. There's been far more "science/techie" articles on his work, most at a level beyond mere mortals, and it's interesting to see his uneditted, real time interactions with "normal space". I look at the insights given as the wanderings of the author while waiting in the gaps and that's probably a goodway to differentiate the article from other interview which often sound like they could have been written while flirting with the research librarian instead.

    The other point to sort of fill in your journalism comment is that the author didn't seem qualified to interpret and report on Hawkingsmost interesting technical topics and I don't know that I'd place a lot of faith in any new and revolutionary findings THAT article might have made. The technical papers based on his actual work are available. This article is just a different perspective on the person that is Hawkings. It does also have the benefit of covering topics that probably wouldn't be covered in those other articles. Certainly not authored by a credible theoretical physics technical journalist 8^)
  • Long range travel isn't as much of a problem if you can find ways around it, literally. The wormhole theories do allow two regions of space, physically separated by huge distances to be joined by a "shortcut". Travel time is still limited to less than the speed of light but the distance has been greatly reduced so the transit time appears faster than possible. Think about places like California where houses, blocks apart, can be hours apart by transit time since you have to go around the canyons separating them. Whose to say that our "straight line 3 dimensional route" is truely the shortest path in an 11 dimensional universe. Go back and read Flatland by Abbott and see what we're up against as 3D beings
  • Okay, wipe my HTML why don't you...

    http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/hawking/computer .html

    Sorry,

    Alex
  • I really don't understand the question. If by "survival of the fittest" you mean a philosophy that states that all "defective" people should be eliminated for the good of the species, then no "we" don't believe that at all. That is just fascism, and trying to justify it in terms of evolution involves a great deal of fallacious reasoning.

    In the sense of evolution, "fitness" is a term applied to a species, not an individual. It is a question of a species being adapted to its environment, and is not a question of being stronger, faster, smarter, tougher etc. The notion that fitness can be measured on some absolute scale, is intimately connected with the assumption that evolution is heading towards some ultimate goal (teleology). It isn't.

    Genetic diversity is an important component of "fitness". Indeed genetic "purity" is the contrary of fitness. A species in which all the individuals are supremely well adapted to the current environment, but not to a slightly different one is heading for extinction.

    Now, back to human beings. The notion of being adapted to our environment makes no sense for us since we have learned to adapt the environment to our own needs. Furthermore we are reasoning animals, capable of acting according to values that are meaningless to all other species. Trying to justify some kind of barbaric social model in terms of what happens in the rest of nature ignores everything that makes us human.

  • I hope your sig is refering to the last audible line of "Are You Experienced?" by Hendrix, cuz that's where it came from in 1968...

    Just thought you'd want to know

  • What can we learn from this?

    That evolution ought to make us dumber, since intelligence is screwing everything up.

    (cf. Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut)

  • "I'm afraid that however clever we may become we will never be able to travel faster than light. If we could travel faster than light we could go back in time."

    I don't think physics has decided yet whether we can cheat our way past light speed. I agree that it seems unlikely, but we shouldn't give up hope.

    "...Earth is by far the most favoured planet in the solar system. Mars is small, cold and without much atmosphere, and the other planets are quite unsuitable for human beings. We either have to learn to live in space stations or travel to the next star. We won't do that in the next century."

    IMHO, people could have moved off the planet in vast numbers already, all it would take is some good PR and getting rid of NASA (which hasn't improved on it's launch methods since the sixties, and continues to convince everyone that space travel is so horribly complicated that only big government bureaucracies can handle it).

    Mars may be small, but since it's not all covered with oceans, it has just as much land area as Earth. With the development of aerogels, we can pretty much just tent over as big an area as we like. If we send a few thousand people over, they'll get sick of living in cans and figure it out pretty quickly.

    Space stations are pretty trivial. You mould a metallic asteroid into a big can, fill it with air, and spin it (you can make one miles thick with Earth gravity even out of aluminum and steel; as we get better at working with carbon we'll make whole hollow worlds). If you make it big enough, you don't even need to worry about micrometeors poking holes, because it would take months or years for all the air to escape. If we weren't such pansies about fission rockets and fission power stations, we could have done this stuff in the fifties.
  • Well, maybe it does, but that's not established.

    I didn't miss his point, I just don't agree with it.

    For the usual obvious reasons, I consider time travel impossible.

    However, I don't believe unquestioningly that travel faster than light speed is impossible just because the current popular theory says it is. Whatever else we know about relativity, we know that it's not complete. It doesn't describe everything, and we may yet produce conditions under which the relativistic time distortions do not occur.
  • We have already (probably) achieved faster-than-light transmission, through quantum tunneling.

    (I don't remember who did the experiment, or whether it's been independently confirmed; could anyone help me out here?)
  • Relativity was developed in part to explain the wierdnesses of particles accelerated to very high speeds (or high energies, as they call it, since at a certain point you just keep pumping energy into the particles and they don't gain any significant speed).

    As particles are accelerated closer and closer to the speed of light, they become more and more massive along a curve that leads to infinity at the speed of light. This has been experimentally confirmed to a high degree (though obviously they haven't created an object of infinite mass going light speed). I don't know much about the experimental support for the relativistic time dilation effect (presumably particles with short half-lives survive for correspondingly longer amounts of time when accelerated near the speed of light), but time is also supposed to slow down and stop at the speed of light (i.e. time is divided by a curve which starts at 1 at full stop and approaches infinite values asymptotically to light speed). Both of these effects prevent any object from reaching light speed.

    The idea that relativity breaks down at light speed is nonsensical, because no object can ever reach light speed (in a simple way).

    When physicists talk about travelling "faster than light," they are talking about non-trivial, non-obvious tricks (like warping space to make the path shorter, or using quantum tunneling to "teleport" in billions of little jumps, or using wormholes to slip crossways along a hidden dimension to a place that only seems far away in 3D). It's pretty well experimentally supported that you can't just build a good enough rocket to go faster than light.
  • ...but I didn't realize he was a genius until I read this

    Hawking is well known for his sense of humour - he likes joking about the American accent his voice synthesiser has given him and about his appearances as himself in his two favourite American ("which isn't saying much")programmes, Star Trek and The Simpsons.

    I mean, really, are the ANY smart people who don't watch the Simpsons.;)
  • Could the 'Marilyn Monroe' picture have been an oblique reference to Einstein, or am I just reading too much into it? ;)
    --
  • I've always held this exact same gripe about Marilyn Vos Savant and her column in Parade.

    It first bothers me that people assume that her IQ makes her the expert on everything from science to relationships and ethics. People seem to forget that there's a difference between INTELLIGENCE and KNOWLEDGE--intelligent people aren't born wise, and wise people aren't always geniuses.

    My second gripe is that she propagates this myth by actually fielding these questions! I'm sure she knows better, and whether there's pressure from the publishers I don't know, but I wish she wouldn't.
  • /. features quite frequent interviews with famous nerds/geeks. But I really do see that the number of scientists who have been interviewd on /. is minimal. During the latest interview with /. runners, a question was raised why /. doesn't concentrate evenly on Linux/Open source and other scientific articles. Well this is one of the best examples of that point in action ? So what say u Mr.Taco ??

    Manifest
  • ...which at one point (early 90's) was apparently read by him directly. I'm certain by now that it's filtered by grad students -- consider the amount of spamcrap the Doctor must receive!

    On an unrelated note, does anyone on that side of the pond have a copy of the television advertisements for "Specsavers" (??) that the interview mentioned? I haven't even seen the Simpsons appearance, and I never knew that he'd done commercials!
  • Bummer, they've added a bunch of filtered public addresses. I can understand it completely, of course. I wonder if the old one still works?

    Hmm.
  • Actually, I'm under the impression that it is widly accepted that faster then light travel and time travel are equivelent. First, it is clear that time travel implies faster then light travel (just go back in time long enough to get you there in time for tea). Second, everyone who I have ever talked to who knows something about realitivity says that faster then light travel.. any sort of faster then light travel (wormholes etc.).. implies time travel. The Feynman lectures in physics I even assigns this as a homework problem, but I can't remember the specific argument. I think the idea is that if you used your faster then light travel in an accellerated refence frame then your "now" points into someone else's past so your faster then light travel places you in the past, i.e. now can not be defined independently of your speed at significant distace away from you.

    Clearly, this has not been experementally observed, but it is based on such fundamental parts of fundamental and well tested theory (realitivity) that it seems unlikely to be wrong. I mean just look at the argument.. its pretty straight forward and uses only basic idea's about realitivity.

    Jeff
  • Um...

    The article is an article about Stephen Hawking, not about Stephen Hawking's thoughts or Stephen Hawking's works.

    It is IMNSHO a very good article, since rather than regurgitating his theories in a layman's language that is both inaccurate and hard for most people to understand, it actually focusses on the person himself.

    I had no idea it took that length of time to compose his answers. I had no idea what sort of room he lived in or that he had come so close to death.

    I'll grant you that this age has an unhealthly interest in personality and personality cults, but this article was a good few notches above Hello magazine. It struck me as an honest account of what and how the author felt interview the person, and since I have often wondered what it would be like to talk to him, I found it interesting.
  • First off, I agree with other posters. This article destribes the humanity of Professor Hawking, something a lot of other journalists miss.

    Second, having been to a lecture given by Professor Hawking, I can say that any description of his humour will always be understated. He is absolutely brilliant, in a way that isn't blaming or shaming, but -does- draw a laugh.

    Third, I felt Professor Hawking's first wife was a little unfairly treated in the article. It can't be easy being in a 100% dependent relationship with a media & scientific celebrity, who is also a genius. Everyone needs to receive, sometime, but in a situation like that, it's difficult to imagine Jane receiving much of the affection or support she needs, as a human being. That's not to say that she's an "innocent victim", or anything. The illness was affecting Professor Hawking severely (leading to at least one collapse, according to the TV version of Brief History) long before they met. Jane may have had a very rough time of things, and my deepest sympathies for that, but it almost certainly was in full knowledge of what she was doing. Passing the buck helps no-one, and merely sets her well on the path of making similar choices in future, choosing emotionally and/or physically unavailable people for friends or relationships. That's not a clever path to be on. Fortunately, it is possible to choose another, but only if the person chooses.

    Fourthly, contact with alien civilisations does NOT require "them" to be at the same level of technology as yourself. That, I think, is a flaw in Professor Hawking's logic. They merely need to have used comparable technology within a window of time that matches up with how long it takes for such signals to reach us, within the timespan that usable detectors exist on Earth. (eg: We could detect electromagnetic devices or -very- intense Neutrino devices with existing observatories. As more forms of information are discovered, more forms of communication are covered, even if we are not as yet capable of understanding such communication.)

    Lastly, you don't need to break the speed of light to exceed it. If there is any way of exploiting non-local effects, quantum-scale wormholes, tesseracts, or other strange (but mathematically valid) phenomina, it may be possible to travel very long distances in relatively short times, WITHOUT causing time-travel paradoxes. This may be a solution to the problem.

  • His illnes and celebrity (Score:3)

    by **SkipKent** (4128) on Friday January 07 2000, @06:44AM (#1395649)
    You are correct, in my opinion, that a significant (but unknown) part of his celebrity is due to his illness. He said so much himself when he said that his illness was an inseparable part of himself. The curiosity aroused by his illness attracts the attention that then brings his genius to light. The coupling of the two make for a fascinating human being. The fact that people ask him questions about et's and whatnot is simply due to the everpresent hope on the part of young interviewers that Someone Significant will reassure us in our dreams that what we see on Star Trek will soon become a reality. ANY time ANYONE interviews a popular scientist, these questions are asked. Par for the course and fine with me. The responses are always enlightening and/or entertaining if you are willing to read into them and the interviewer's reactions.

    You sound a little bitter about his success, and I'm sure you have your own personal reasons for that, largely boiling down to jealousy and/or disappointment in your own achievements and the recognition you feel they do or don't deserve. Get over it, I say, and get on with your own work, whatever that is. No one ever achieved greatness OR celebrity by muttering bitterly about the success of another.

  • a shame (Score:3)

    by ilkahn (6642) on Friday January 07 2000, @03:44AM (#1395650) Homepage
    This was quite frankly, one of the worst articles I feel like I have ever read. Dr. Hawking is one of the most brilliant minds of our time, i think I get a big duh for that one, and I was so excited that in an article with we might get to read and understand a few of the brilliant insights into the world around us that he has.

    However, I was treated to an article about the writer, in which he described, in great detail, every aspect of Dr. Hawkings condition. This was not what I was looking for, it is sad that this article made it through a writer, and an editor. At no point no one stopped to think, "Hm... we have a genious here, why are we spending most of our time on how the writer perceives things?" Call me crazy, but I don't give two shits about how the writer felt about the 5 minute long pauses between answers, I equally don't give a shit about the regimen of pills and Dr. Hawkings love life! I wanted meat, I wanted guts, I wanted science... and I got fluff. Hell of a way to throw away a chance to trully ask why and wherefore of genious... by the same token, I know a lot of the journalism majors at my university... and I don't think they could have come up with much better questions either. A better standard for interviewing and journalism is needed, the journalist is just an eye witness to the world around him, not an active participant... that's just my 2 cents.

  • Re:a shame (Score:3)

    by Croaker (10633) on Friday January 07 2000, @05:26AM (#1395651)
    If you wanted meaty science discussion, you could just read his book, or some of his papers.

    I actually liked the article, since it gave you insight into the man. He is a fascinating figure, for precisely the contradiction the reporter stated: the giant intellect locked in a body incapable of communicating more than a few words per minute.

    In a way, the article de-romanticised Hawking. He's just a man, although incredibly gifted and incredibly infirm. You get more of a feel for his sense of humor, and at the same time a feel for the ego behind it. All people generally see of him is the wheelchair, the voice synthesizer, and the towering intellect. It's interesting that he, too, has feelings, has failings, and even acknowledges them.

    It seems easy to put men like Hawking into a typecast role. Einstein, for example, was probably the root of the "absent minded professor" stereotype that's turned up in so many movies. It came as a revelation to many that he had had a child outsite of marriage, and had actually treated the mother and child fairly poorly. To understand these people, and how they came to be who they are, it's important to look at the entire person.

    Of course, there's nothing wrong with just looking at a person's body of work. For most of the music I listen to, for example, I couldn't care less about the personal lives of the artist. In some cases, you want to get to know the person behind the art or science, in other cases you don't. This was an article for people who wanted to get to know a bit more about Hawking, the man, rather than Hawking's body of scientific work.

  • What irony? (Score:3)

    by Sloppy (14984) on Friday January 07 2000, @07:15AM (#1395652) Homepage Journal

    His brilliant mind is, for evolutionary sake, useless if in his crippled body.

    That's funny, I thought the man had children and even grandchildren. That pretty much shoots down the 'useless for evolutionary sake' argument.

    As for 'survival of the fittest' it is important to realize that nature's idea of fitness is very different from what humans value as desirable. A lot of people seem to have this really weird idea that, as the human race evolves, we will become more "advanced" in an idealistic StarTrek kind of way -- we'll become smarter, for example. But that doesn't necessarily follow. If Darwinian genetic selection has its way, we might get smarter and faster, or we might dumb down and turn into Cockroach People instead. Who knows?

    But the whole process is being tampered with on a wide scale these days, anyway. While Uncle Chuck's theory of evolution does a great job of explaining the past, it's almost useless for predicting the future. For the last few thousand years, memetic selection has totally overpowered genetic selection, and even genetics themselves will be manipulated (as Hawking touched on in the article). The situation is so complex now, that there's just no telling who is really more "fit" and who isn't. That crippled people like Hawking are around, isn't ironic or surprising at all.


    ---
  • So many are upset by the article because of this point of that. I agree that it could have been better written. I agree that the author's perceptions/feelings about delays between answers are irrelevant.

    What we come down to is this:

    • We all agree that the man is brilliant beyond measure.
    • We get a chance to see that while he's an intellectual giant, he's also as human as the rest of us.
    Conversationally, although slow, Hawking is fascinating. He has knowledge and understanding on a broad range of subjects. Why else would Cosmopolitan readers vote him one or the 10 sexiest men on the planet? {My wife showed that one to me.})

    We come away from this article, not with some Earth shattering pearl of wisdom from Dr. Hawking but, with a glimps into what his world is like.
    "Una piccola canzone, un piccolo ballo, poco seltzer giù i vostri pantaloni."

  • Some people just don't get it. (Score:3)

    by Robert Link (42853) on Friday January 07 2000, @05:04AM (#1395654) Homepage
    I confess, I'm a little puzzled by all the negative reactions this article is getting. I thought it was an excellent piece of journalism. Where it could have given us a few stock quotes reiterating the stuff in Hawking's books it gives us instead, a real insight into how Hawking thinks, instead of just what he thinks.


    Most of the outrage seems to center around the "expressing his thoughts at the speed of an imbecille" comment. When I read this comment, I saw in it, not the writer's impatience with, but his empathy for Hawking's condition. The writer was trying to get us to imagine for a moment what it would be like to live that way and how it might change our outlook on life. We have to wonder, could we cope the way Hawking has? In a similar vein, the connection the writer draws between Hawking's condition and his prediction of genetic engineering in the future was insightful.


    Of course, if you went in hoping for a slate of predictions about what might await us in the years to come, I can see how you would be disappointed, but, frankly, I am bored with futurists' predictions. They fall basically into two categories: wild and largely unfounded speculation, and timid, conservative predictions of incremental change. I find Hawking himself more interesting than his predictions were likely to be, and I was glad the writer used speculating about the future as a pretext to give us a glimpse into what makes him tick.


    -r

  • Has there ever been one?

    If so, when

    if not why not?

    I would think that we could come up with better questions than this moronic journalist did.

  • Why he is so intelligent... (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 07 2000, @03:26AM (#1395656)
    "a man with a freakishly quick, brilliant and creative mind condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile."

    Perhaps this is why he's so smart. He's forced to think about what he says before he does it. Many of us are lead to knee jerk reactions :)

  • Running out of space by 2600 (Score:4)

    by Jon Abbott (723) on Friday January 07 2000, @05:10AM (#1395657) Homepage
    I did some math to check his claim of the earth being full by 2600, and it's quite funny -- the population density (following only the exponential condition that was given) would be one person per 0.78 m^2!

    The formula I used is this:
    ((4*pi*(6371315)^2)*.3)/((6e9)*2^n), where n is the number of times the population doubles. The exponential condition given was that the population doubles each 40 years. I used 3:10 as the land to total area ratio.

    -- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?

  • Random thoughts (Score:4)

    by EricWright (16803) on Friday January 07 2000, @03:50AM (#1395658)
    As I read through the article, I was hit by a flurry of mixed emotions.

    One of the first things to hit me was that the author was trying to portray Dr. Hawking as an actual human being, as opposed to the "cybernetic being" his illness has forced him into. The reference to his image superimposed on a picture of Marilyn Monroe was a refreshing divergence from the usual portrayal of the man.

    However, I was later offended by the author's apparent lack of patience. His comment about "a man...condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile" made me wince. Here he is, one of a privileged few journalists with the opportunity to spend an afternoon with the greatest mind of the last 50 years, and he is focussing on the man's physical disabilities. I nearly stopped reading at that point.

    I didn't, though. And later on, even though the author repeatedly referred to the duration of the pauses he "endured", I began to detect a shift in the author's attitude. For one, by the end of the article, he was focusing more and more on *what* Dr. Hawking had to say, and not the way in which it was said. The man can't help it if a computer has to vocalize his thoughts for him. Thankfully, this issue was deemphasized later on.

    One the the high points of the article is that it touches on the guest appearances he has done on ST:TNG and The Simpsons. I find it interesting that he enjoys the satiric, biting wit of the Simpsons!

    One point I want to make, that the author didn't, and may not even know, refers to the quote from David Schramm (yes, this is probably quite minor)... the author refers to Dr. Schramm in the present. Unfortunately, he passed away in a single-engine plane crash in December 1997.

    All in all, I though the interview contained much information about his personal life that has not been addressed much in other articles. I just wish the author had not come across as a bit crass in the beginning. If I did not come from a physics background, and thus hold Dr. Hawking in the highest regard, I might not have read the article through to the end for that reason.

    All this, of course, IMO. And yes, real news for nerds!

    Eric

  • Why ask Hawking? (Score:4)

    by Stephen (20676) on Friday January 07 2000, @03:44AM (#1395659) Homepage
    I have to be careful here, because I work in the next building to him!

    But I wonder why people feel it's useful to ask Prof. Hawking these type of questions. Of course he's phenomenally intelligent. But he's a theoretical physicist. Are his opinions on space travel, genetic engineering etc. really of more worth than any other highly intelligent non-expert's?

    No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness. But that's a whole nother rant...

  • Re:Why ask Hawking? (Score:5)

    by Enoch Root (57473) on Friday January 07 2000, @06:08AM (#1395660)
    Not that I'm for hero worship, and I agree that his illness has something to do with his celebrity. Let's face it: it's romantic to think of Hawking as a genius trapped in an imperfect body. It's the uber-geek analogy. A lot of people identify with it, and scientists first.

    Now, I would hesitate to call Hawking a fraud because he's popular. I believe he's popular for a reason. During graduate studies in particle physics, I had the pleasure to go through nasty and complex peer-reviewed journals like Quantum Gravity and the eternal Physics Letter. I stumbled upon a few of Stephen Hawking's papers.

    They're the real thing. The guys does have a knack for theoretical thinking, and many of his ideas are both controversial, somewhat useless, and fascinating. He's done a lot of theoretical work on black holes, as well, and in this field, he is considered a pioneer.

    (One final exam question in a General Relativity class went like this: Given Hawking's Law, calculate the resulting maximal mass and angular momentum of two black holes of equal mass but opposite angular momentum. Fun!)

    The journalists and the public are to blame, here. They're the ones who go see Hawking like he's got some sort of dedicated phone line with God. But that's what's the public perception of science inevitably is. You wouldn't believe the questions I get asked that have nothing to do with my field of expertise.

    A Brief History of Time's goal was to entertain and make the public's mind bend around physics problems. As such, it was magnificently successful. Of course it ain't established astrophysical theory, and of course it contains controversial material. Anything that's ever been considered interesting in Science has been controversial. Heck, Newton's Theory of Gravitation is still considered controversial by some people.

    I think this interview illustrates the perception of the media, and the usual response Hawking gives. His whole 'We haven't received visitors from the future' gig is old, but it makes people laugh and dream. He plays the celebrity gig, and usually he doesn't have anything much to say to people looking up to him like some sort of Homeric hero. But to discredit him as a scientist, and say he's anything but a brilliant one, is not understanding the man fully.

    Yes, there are many other scientists alive who probably deserve Hawking's exposure, only for their ideas and their minds. But celebrity isn't just about minds. When Hawking and I speak of physics, the layman probably has no idea who says the most profound things, because it's all a blur to them. But Hawking is in a wheelchair and is an eccentric. And that, usually, means celebrity more than mastery of mathematics.

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