High Table at Cambridge with Stephen Hawking

bughunter writes "Accomplished astrophysicist and SF author Gregory Benford shares a personal account of his recent conversation with Stephen Hawking at Reason Online. As usual, Benford's style is engaging and informal, and this doesn't read like a typical interview. Although the article is short on jargon, Benford and Hawking share insights on the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, as such minds are want to do. We even get a glimpse of Cambridge tunnel hacking. Of course, there's also a plug for Hawking's new book, The Universe in a Nutshell."

Hum.

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of this actually took place in the conversation, and how much is just the author attempting to summarize current interesting stuff in the world of physics using a conversation with Stephen Hawking as a framing device?

I mean, it really feels like the latter. I find it hard to believe that Hawking, talking to another physisist, would bother, for example, going into detail explaining what planck time is.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, and it was an interesting read. But it was kind of irritating and clumsy the way that the story seemed like nothing more than a framing device to the author (Did anyone else read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius?), and everything they discussed seemed smoothed out and dumbed down and simplified to its bare essentials so that people like, well.. so that people like me could understand it. Kind of like the way that the author describes hawking's new book.
I guess i shouldn't complain, since it was better than i could have done, but i wish he'd just repeated stuff and then explained on the side, subtitle style, instead of inserting the layman's explanations into the conversation (assuming, of course, that this was actually what he did..)

Can anyone recommend something i could read if i'm a casual observer curious about what's going on in physics, but who would like a little more depth than this? Like, just so that things aren't so skimmed over that they just seem like crackpot, randomly selected theories with no basis in anything (which of course it seems this way if you don't mention why, mathematically, they came to these conclusions...). I mean, if i want shallow summaries of the physics community, i always have Discover :)

Re:History repeats itself

[HorsePunchKid]

I'm not going to completely disagree with you, but I do think it's rather unfair to suggest Einstein was unproductive after publishing his theories of relativity. In particular, he played an important part in the early interpretations of quantum mechanics (as opposed to the formulations). One of the truly astounding thought experiments he (along with Podolsky and Rosen) came up with is still being sorted out. Essentially he first recognized the problems with assuming local realism; that it is in some sense possible for quantum entities to communicate faster than the speed of light. The thought experiment was later refined by J. S. Bell, to whom the idea of exploiting this quantum entanglement is now popularly attributed. This is just one of many conceptual contributions Einstein made to the early development of quantum physics. (Google can find you much more information about Bell's experiment and Einstein's hand in it, along with a better description of exactly why the EPR experiment is so mind-bending.) On a different note, I believe he also became very politically active, with the rise of the Nazi regime in that era, but I'm not really qualified to comment on that.

Re:History repeats itself

[yoshiborg]

ah, but can we not let an old man have some peace? so what if einstein spent his days sailing his little boat instead of single-mindedly persuing every nook and cranny of theoretical physics. scientists can be seen like artists: they create their works and persue their talents for their own reasons; they don't owe us, the public, anything. just ask piro...

no disrespect meant, but these people are allowed to have their own lives and they're quite capable of making their own decisions.

Re:In the presence of greatness

[jcsehak]

James Joyce said something like "I've never met an uninteresting person." I think one of the biggest mistakes anyone can make is to underestimate anyone, and write them off somehow. Perhaps, if Hawking views a conversation with you as a waste of time, that shows a deficincy in him? I think if you can't learn something interesting from talking to anyone, you need to improve your communication skills. That's the rub though. Most people just talk small talk, and need to figure out how to really communicate. I know I do.

Re:The Priests of Science

[Brown]

First off, Hawking's theories have sod-all to do with "God's existance or nonexistance", as the man himself says; he states that if you choose to call phsics 'god' then what the hell, but it won't change anything. ("We could call order by the name of God, but it would be an impersonal God.")

With regard to the bit about other universes being untestible making it non-science, consider:
There is a (hypothetical, for now) theory which describes the universe as observed better than any other, and is mathematically sensible. You would surely agree that this is 'better science' than other less accurate theories.
If one of the side-effects of this theory is to predict the existance of other universes which we cannot prove, in what way does this make the theory a less useful desciption of our own? None, of course...