I get that Hawking's work is incredible and that he, himself, is an amazing person. But is his work really worth putting him on the same pedestal as Newton?
I have the same feeling, and I think people often mix his personal achievement (fighting a degenerative disease for so long and being a very large mind in the world of cosmology) with his scientific achievements (helping refine cosmology and think about black holes and their interactions). I've read several of his books and papers, and while they are definitely very brilliant, he never produced a Principa Mathematica (even Einstein didn't).
In many ways I would argue that Einstein would be a more apt comparison. Einstein based most of his fundamental musings by identifying issues you see when combining different fields and then using thought-experiments to think about these issues. Hawking similarly operated through though-experiments and trying to piece together different concepts from different fields (though he focused far more on cosmology).
Einstein was a brilliant scientist (obviously), but people often over-complicate his work. In many ways, the real beauty of Einstein's work was just how simple and fundamental it was -- and how un-intuitive the final conclusions are. Newton is a whole different ballgame (even though he was wrong about absolute space and time -- but that conclusion took Maxwell's equations to discover).
I think GR is at Newton's level. They say most of Physics is very iterative, and if X didn't discover Z, the probably another person Y would have 5-10 yrs later. But this is not true for GR. GR came out of the blue, it wasn't strictly required to explain anything important back then. It was just Einstein sitting down, doing thought experiments about elevators in space, then a huge, incomprehensible (to me) mental leap to manifolds and tensors, and the Einstein equation. You can try this yourself: read his popular GR book (it's excellent), then pick up a GR textbook and read the first chapter, and see if you could get from the thought experiments to constructing the math.
It's hard to compare it to Newton, bc Newton also had to invent Calculus, but it's up there.
This is actually the subject of a long-running dispute. Fun fact: Hilbert submitted a paper with the field equations of GR before Einstein - but it was published later.
Yes, I've studied and done physics research (I have yet to finish my degree, but I've completed all of the physics topics). (My research topics were on astroseismology and non-linear optics -- not related to SR or GR, but we went through the derivations and reasoning of SR in class.)
> I think GR is at Newton's level.
I think you've misunderstood what I meant by "people over-complicate Einstein's work". My point wasn't that Einstein is somehow inferior to Newton, it was that a large part of Einstein's work is actually incredibly simple (compared to how it is pitched) which to me makes it all the more genius.
> GR came out of the blue, it wasn't strictly required to explain anything important back then.
The core idea behind GR came from thought experiments trying to understand how SR might be extended to non-inertial frames. In many ways this is the most obvious thing to consider after you've come up with SR: "what if we start accelerating?"
Also, SR similarly wasn't required to explain anything important. Einstein was thinking very deeply about what does it mean to "measure" something, and the first section of his paper was discussions of synchronized clocks and how they relate to measurements (possibly the furthest thing from a "real" problem you can have).
> then a huge, incomprehensible (to me) mental leap to manifolds and tensors, and the Einstein equation.
In Einstein's case, he had quite a bit of help with the mathematics (again, not to detract at all -- but we should separate the mathematical derivation from intuition). Intuition is the driving force in physics (with mathematics fleshing out what the logical conclusion of an intuition must be), and so I find discussing the intuition to be far more critical when talking about physical theories.
The core genius was the realisation that acceleration changes how light beams look to observers -- and the intuition that acceleration must have an equivalence to gravity. Neither of these things are complicated, and you could explain them to anyone who has seen a projectile or stood in an elevator. But the conclusion you come to is far from obvious.
And that, to me, is the beauty of physics. Obviously the intuition is just the first step, and there is plenty of brilliance in all of the manifold and tensor equations (it's definitely above my pay-grade), but I think that over-hyping the mathematics isn't quite right either.
> It's hard to compare it to Newton, bc Newton also had to invent Calculus, but it's up there.
That is effectively what I was saying. Newton had Principa Mathematica and in many ways pioneered the mathematical viewpoint that we use in physics today.
"SR similarly wasn't required to explain anything important"
Wasnt it the case that no one was able to explain Michaelson-Morley experiment? That speed of light was measured to be the same irresective of observer speed? Ppl came with all sorts of explanations (ether/lorentz tx etc), but it was Einstein who had the creativity to suggest that maybe time itself was slowing down. With that insight, the rest was beautifuly derivable.
And this is also why, Hilbert was able to (and otherws were racing to) derive the field equations before Einstein, since Einstein needed help from mathematicians (Grossman?), and Hilbert was an already excellent mathematician. SR and GR is derivable from beautifuly simple insights (time slowdown, gravity/acceleration equivalence).
One could say Einstein came with this insight out of the blue, but Poincare was also investigating time dilation, but stopped because it was too counter-intuitive.
"SR similarly wasn't required to explain anything important"
I don't agree. The Maxwell equations (1865-1875) already implicitly encode the Lorentz transformation as the symmetry group, that's one of those "sooner or later somebody would have come along and put a spacetime theory behind it" thing, in this sense it's not up there with Newton. As you probably know there were a bunch of physicists who were looking at this (eg. Lorentz, Poincare, Larmor, etc). Then it was Einstein who tied it all together, and it was called the Special Theory of Relativity. (But this is one of those cases where this was going to happen anyway.)
I agree that Einstein was able to borrow manifolds and tensor calculus from the mathematicians, unlike Newton, who had to invent everything.
Indeed. He is a media darling, was a great science popularizer, and decidedly influential in his own sub-subfield of black hole cosmology, but in the greater context of physics "just another" accomplished researcher. On a purely personal level, of course, his career was quite remarkable given his condition.
>But is his work really worth putting him on the same pedestal as Newton?
Sure. Hawking's work greatly extended our understanding of black holes is fascinating and important to our understand of both the origin of the universe and it's ultimate demise. For the question of "What was the Universe prior to the Big Bang", the Hartle-Hawking state is, at current, one of our best answers - likely a singularity of both space and time, meaning that the idea of a boundary for the beginning of time isn't something that actually exists.
Newtonian physics are important in that at the energy and mass levels we experience life in, they work out to be close enough to how things actually work as to not be meaningfully distinct.
But they're not actually (the most) correct. Special relativity, general relativity, and quantum mechanics show that we have more correct understandings of physics than Newton's, and certain ideas of Newton's are incompatible with our current understanding. Gravity is an interesting and simple one - with Newtonian physics, the apple falls to earth. However, Galileo would have disagreed with Newton, had they been able to discuss the topic. Leibniz did disagree. Newton was a believer in an absolute frame of reference in the universe, whereas the underpinning of general relativity is that all frames of reference are relative - that if you use the apple as your frame of reference, it is the earth falling towards it. And this wasn't something new that came from Einstein and Hilbert - Galileo recognized this, Leibniz recognized this, etc. Even when Newton was using Galileo's principal of relativity to develop Newtonian physics, he diverged on this fairly central part.
In fact, the work of Einstein and others has shown us that gravity is almost certainly not a force at all, that mass is not attracting mass over a distance.
TLDR: Newtonian physics aren't actually "correct", yet we venerate him because of how important of a body of work they are. Hawking's work on black holes and singularities is important to our understanding of where the universe came from and how it will end.
Thank you. In the same vein, it bothers me that Hawking weighs in on AI/ML when he clearly hasn't written a line of ML code in his life. The popular press picks up on his drivel as if he is some authority in the field leading to unsubstantiated fears and misinformation.
