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.

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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."

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• 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 conferences in science

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