I hate the new stephen hawking movie. I hate it for many reasons. First and foremost, I hate it because the title is wrong. Stephen Hawking didn't posit a theory of everything. Its called the grand unified field theory, a concept too big for dumb Americans. He didn't even contribute to that concept or solve it! It was Einstein who hoped for a GUF not Hawking. But quantum mechanics forever dislodged the hope. And Hawking moved it not one iota further.
Second, I hate the movie because there was ALREADY a stephen hawking movie. A pretty good one - a brief history of time. Narrated by the real stephen hawking.
Third, I hate the movie because I don't think Hawking was such a great physicist. Sure they gave him the newton chair and a teaching position, but was that over published papers and quality of research, or because everyone felt sorry for him and his ALS disease? No one has to tell me how tragic these things are I've lived it. But it hardly makes for a brilliant physicist.
What about black holes. Hawking discovered black holes you scream. Actually, it really was pretty easy to deduce the concept once the article on the chandrasekhar or however you spell it limit was published. And Eddington was also keenly aware of their possibility.
What about the big bang theory?
"The Big Bang Theory is an American sitcom created by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, both of whom serve as executive producers on the show along with Steven .."
err sorry. That's what wikipedia says about it.
Well there are many now who argue agasint big bang theory.
Fahr set off to find a phenomenon that would naturally cause the universe to emanate a smooth microwave glow from all directions in space, like a glowing ember at a few degrees above absolute zero. He says he found one. “There was never a recombination event,” Fahr says of his model of the microwave background. “In my view [the microwave background] is just a kind of entropy feature of the cosmos as it is.”
In debating the interpretation of the cosmic microwave background, Fahr joins a long and distinguished line of heterodox astrophysicists, including the celebrated astronomers Halton Arp, Sir Fred Hoyle, and the Nobel Prize winner Hannes Alfvén. These skeptics have ascribed the microwave background to assortments of glowing clouds of gas, dust, and charged particles throughout the galaxy and nearby universe. These clumps of molecular interlopers, they claim, translate starlight bouncing around the universe into a quiet and dim bath of microwave light, a little bit like how the Earth’s atmosphere scatters blue sunlight to produce the daytime sky.
But it's not just big bang theory. or GuF. Hawking was challenged on black hole theory as well:
"It was at Erhard’s house in San Francisco in 1981 that Susskind and Hawking began their now infamous Black Hole War, which became the title of Susskind’s subsequent book. Hawking made the stunning claim that material which falls into a black hole disappears forever. If correct, it would mean that the fundamental laws of the universe would have to be rewritten. From the point of view of a quantum theorist, like Susskind, this was impossible: the central principle of quantum mechanics is that information can never be annihilated.
Susskind drove home preoccupied by Hawking’s claim. “I was trying to visualise the geometry of a black hole and the weather was so bad that the windshield was covered with frost. As the traffic slowed down, I drew the diagram on the frosted windshield with my finger. I was obsessed with it. I couldn’t see how what he said was right. On the other hand I couldn’t see anything wrong with it either.”
Thus two great theories of physics – general relativity, which describes gravity, and quantum mechanics, which describes everything else – began a heated tussle. In the end Susskind managed to prove the information sucked into a black hole is indeed conserved."
In the end I see Hawking as a smart man, sadly stricken, but a far leap from the greatest modern minds. I simply cannot list his accomplishments. His best work really is a brief history of time and his concept of cosmic eggs and time-universe moving itself along a path. This work in temporality is of course 100% theoretical and not so useful quite at the moment.
