Hawking Hawking! The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity with NYU Prof. Charles Selfe (#145)

Immediately recognizable in his wheelchair and surrounded by an
entourage of nurses, Stephen Hawking was a symbol of the power of
mind over matter. The public adored him, and the media compared
hirn to Newton and Einstein. Appearing at concerts, on The
Simpsons, and even on the edge of space, he was widely considered
the world's best physicist, and even its smartest person. Thanks to
our sponsor BioOptimizes! Sleep better with
www.magbreakthrough.com/impossible and use code impossible at
checkout to save 10% In fact, he was neither. In HAWKING HAWKING:
The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity (Basic Books; April 6, 2021),
science journalist and author Charles Selfe upends everything we
thought we knew about Hawking, showing how his greatest genius was
arguably in his talent for self-promotion. Delving deeper than
previous biographies, which tend to be excessively flattering,
Seife reveals Hawking as an important scientist whose importance is
almost universally misunderstood; a person who suffered deeply and
also caused deep suffering; a celebrity his forebears and
fundamentally changed the concept of a scientific celebrity."
scientist who broke the mold. To understand Hawking, Seife traces
his life in reverse, starting with his elaborate funeral at
Westminster Abbey, where he was interred few feet away from Newton
and Darwin, through the decades when he searched in the limelight
for the recognition he craved, and further back to his devastating
ALS diagnosis at age 21 and the beginning of his first marriage,
which would end in scandal. Hawking made important contributions
early in his career, most notably in his work on black holes, but
as his celebrity grew he was increasingly apt to declare victory
over problems he hadn't solved, persuading audiences of his
authority on topics about which he knew little and enlisting
students to defend him as he failed to break any new ground in the
quest for a "theory of everything." Get the book: Hawking Hawking:
https://amzn.to/3u8Na5o 00:00:00 Introduction 07:00 Did Charles get
blowback from criticizing an icon? 21:45 Hawking Hartle then m
theory - do physicists believe either of them? 28:00 Why everything
we think we know about Stephen Hawking is wrong! In his lifetime,
Hawking was seen as a genius on par with Newton. In reality, he was
by no means the greatest physicist of his day. His early work on
black holes was groundbreaking, but, Seife argues, much of his
later work failed to measure up its promise, and physicists like
Roger Penrose ultimately deserve more credit than Hawking. 38:59
Why did Hawking concede the BH information paradox? 42:35 What
would Charles like to ask Hawking as a journalist? 50:00 The
tragedy of Hawking's disability, and its relationship to his public
image. How Hawking struggled knowing that part of his celebrity was
based on his illness. 57:36 The halo effect 58:28 How is life as a
professor of journalism at NYU? 1:00:00 The perils of press
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