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Stephen Hawking on The Future
RalfM writes "As far as people worth listening to go, Stephen Hawking
is right up there. Some newspapers are currently presenting
a rare
interview with him about the future. Points mentioned include
Marylin Monroe, off-planet migration, DNA reprogramming, limits to human brain processing ("We can be quick-witted or very
intelligent, but not both.") and more. "
Um...
The article is an article about Stephen Hawking, not about Stephen Hawking's thoughts or Stephen Hawking's works.
It is IMNSHO a very good article, since rather than regurgitating his theories in a layman's language that is both inaccurate and hard for most people to understand, it actually focusses on the person himself.
I had no idea it took that length of time to compose his answers. I had no idea what sort of room he lived in or that he had come so close to death.
I'll grant you that this age has an unhealthly interest in personality and personality cults, but this article was a good few notches above Hello magazine. It struck me as an honest account of what and how the author felt interview the person, and since I have often wondered what it would be like to talk to him, I found it interesting.
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Second, having been to a lecture given by Professor Hawking, I can say that any description of his humour will always be understated. He is absolutely brilliant, in a way that isn't blaming or shaming, but -does- draw a laugh.
Third, I felt Professor Hawking's first wife was a little unfairly treated in the article. It can't be easy being in a 100% dependent relationship with a media & scientific celebrity, who is also a genius. Everyone needs to receive, sometime, but in a situation like that, it's difficult to imagine Jane receiving much of the affection or support she needs, as a human being. That's not to say that she's an "innocent victim", or anything. The illness was affecting Professor Hawking severely (leading to at least one collapse, according to the TV version of Brief History) long before they met. Jane may have had a very rough time of things, and my deepest sympathies for that, but it almost certainly was in full knowledge of what she was doing. Passing the buck helps no-one, and merely sets her well on the path of making similar choices in future, choosing emotionally and/or physically unavailable people for friends or relationships. That's not a clever path to be on. Fortunately, it is possible to choose another, but only if the person chooses.
Fourthly, contact with alien civilisations does NOT require "them" to be at the same level of technology as yourself. That, I think, is a flaw in Professor Hawking's logic. They merely need to have used comparable technology within a window of time that matches up with how long it takes for such signals to reach us, within the timespan that usable detectors exist on Earth. (eg: We could detect electromagnetic devices or -very- intense Neutrino devices with existing observatories. As more forms of information are discovered, more forms of communication are covered, even if we are not as yet capable of understanding such communication.)
Lastly, you don't need to break the speed of light to exceed it. If there is any way of exploiting non-local effects, quantum-scale wormholes, tesseracts, or other strange (but mathematically valid) phenomina, it may be possible to travel very long distances in relatively short times, WITHOUT causing time-travel paradoxes. This may be a solution to the problem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
You are correct, in my opinion, that a significant (but unknown) part of his celebrity is due to his illness. He said so much himself when he said that his illness was an inseparable part of himself. The curiosity aroused by his illness attracts the attention that then brings his genius to light. The coupling of the two make for a fascinating human being. The fact that people ask him questions about et's and whatnot is simply due to the everpresent hope on the part of young interviewers that Someone Significant will reassure us in our dreams that what we see on Star Trek will soon become a reality. ANY time ANYONE interviews a popular scientist, these questions are asked. Par for the course and fine with me. The responses are always enlightening and/or entertaining if you are willing to read into them and the interviewer's reactions.
You sound a little bitter about his success, and I'm sure you have your own personal reasons for that, largely boiling down to jealousy and/or disappointment in your own achievements and the recognition you feel they do or don't deserve. Get over it, I say, and get on with your own work, whatever that is. No one ever achieved greatness OR celebrity by muttering bitterly about the success of another.
**>>BELCH
However, I was treated to an article about the writer, in which he described, in great detail, every aspect of Dr. Hawkings condition. This was not what I was looking for, it is sad that this article made it through a writer, and an editor. At no point no one stopped to think, "Hm... we have a genious here, why are we spending most of our time on how the writer perceives things?" Call me crazy, but I don't give two shits about how the writer felt about the 5 minute long pauses between answers, I equally don't give a shit about the regimen of pills and Dr. Hawkings love life! I wanted meat, I wanted guts, I wanted science... and I got fluff. Hell of a way to throw away a chance to trully ask why and wherefore of genious... by the same token, I know a lot of the journalism majors at my university... and I don't think they could have come up with much better questions either. A better standard for interviewing and journalism is needed, the journalist is just an eye witness to the world around him, not an active participant... that's just my 2 cents.
That's funny, I thought the man had children and even grandchildren. That pretty much shoots down the 'useless for evolutionary sake' argument.
As for 'survival of the fittest' it is important to realize that nature's idea of fitness is very different from what humans value as desirable. A lot of people seem to have this really weird idea that, as the human race evolves, we will become more "advanced" in an idealistic StarTrek kind of way -- we'll become smarter, for example. But that doesn't necessarily follow. If Darwinian genetic selection has its way, we might get smarter and faster, or we might dumb down and turn into Cockroach People instead. Who knows?
But the whole process is being tampered with on a wide scale these days, anyway. While Uncle Chuck's theory of evolution does a great job of explaining the past, it's almost useless for predicting the future. For the last few thousand years, memetic selection has totally overpowered genetic selection, and even genetics themselves will be manipulated (as Hawking touched on in the article). The situation is so complex now, that there's just no telling who is really more "fit" and who isn't. That crippled people like Hawking are around, isn't ironic or surprising at all.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What we come down to is this:
- We all agree that the man is brilliant beyond measure.
- We get a chance to see that while he's an intellectual giant, he's also as human as the rest of us.
Conversationally, although slow, Hawking is fascinating. He has knowledge and understanding on a broad range of subjects. Why else would Cosmopolitan readers vote him one or the 10 sexiest men on the planet? {My wife showed that one to me.})We come away from this article, not with some Earth shattering pearl of wisdom from Dr. Hawking but, with a glimps into what his world is like.
"Una piccola canzone, un piccolo ballo, poco seltzer giù i vostri pantaloni."
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Most of the outrage seems to center around the "expressing his thoughts at the speed of an imbecille" comment. When I read this comment, I saw in it, not the writer's impatience with, but his empathy for Hawking's condition. The writer was trying to get us to imagine for a moment what it would be like to live that way and how it might change our outlook on life. We have to wonder, could we cope the way Hawking has? In a similar vein, the connection the writer draws between Hawking's condition and his prediction of genetic engineering in the future was insightful.
Of course, if you went in hoping for a slate of predictions about what might await us in the years to come, I can see how you would be disappointed, but, frankly, I am bored with futurists' predictions. They fall basically into two categories: wild and largely unfounded speculation, and timid, conservative predictions of incremental change. I find Hawking himself more interesting than his predictions were likely to be, and I was glad the writer used speculating about the future as a pretext to give us a glimpse into what makes him tick.
-r
Has there ever been one?
If so, when
if not why not?
I would think that we could come up with better questions than this moronic journalist did.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
"a man with a freakishly quick, brilliant and creative mind condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile."
:)
Perhaps this is why he's so smart. He's forced to think about what he says before he does it. Many of us are lead to knee jerk reactions
I did some math to check his claim of the earth being full by 2600, and it's quite funny -- the population density (following only the exponential condition that was given) would be one person per 0.78 m^2!
The formula I used is this:
((4*pi*(6371315)^2)*.3)/((6e9)*2^n), where n is the number of times the population doubles. The exponential condition given was that the population doubles each 40 years. I used 3:10 as the land to total area ratio.
-- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
As I read through the article, I was hit by a flurry of mixed emotions.
One of the first things to hit me was that the author was trying to portray Dr. Hawking as an actual human being, as opposed to the "cybernetic being" his illness has forced him into. The reference to his image superimposed on a picture of Marilyn Monroe was a refreshing divergence from the usual portrayal of the man.
However, I was later offended by the author's apparent lack of patience. His comment about "a man...condemned forever to articulate his thoughts at the speed of an imbecile" made me wince. Here he is, one of a privileged few journalists with the opportunity to spend an afternoon with the greatest mind of the last 50 years, and he is focussing on the man's physical disabilities. I nearly stopped reading at that point.
I didn't, though. And later on, even though the author repeatedly referred to the duration of the pauses he "endured", I began to detect a shift in the author's attitude. For one, by the end of the article, he was focusing more and more on *what* Dr. Hawking had to say, and not the way in which it was said. The man can't help it if a computer has to vocalize his thoughts for him. Thankfully, this issue was deemphasized later on.
One the the high points of the article is that it touches on the guest appearances he has done on ST:TNG and The Simpsons. I find it interesting that he enjoys the satiric, biting wit of the Simpsons!
One point I want to make, that the author didn't, and may not even know, refers to the quote from David Schramm (yes, this is probably quite minor)... the author refers to Dr. Schramm in the present. Unfortunately, he passed away in a single-engine plane crash in December 1997.
All in all, I though the interview contained much information about his personal life that has not been addressed much in other articles. I just wish the author had not come across as a bit crass in the beginning. If I did not come from a physics background, and thus hold Dr. Hawking in the highest regard, I might not have read the article through to the end for that reason.
All this, of course, IMO. And yes, real news for nerds!
Eric
I have to be careful here, because I work in the next building to him!
But I wonder why people feel it's useful to ask Prof. Hawking these type of questions. Of course he's phenomenally intelligent. But he's a theoretical physicist. Are his opinions on space travel, genetic engineering etc. really of more worth than any other highly intelligent non-expert's?
No, I fear that people only ask him because he's a celebrity. And I fear that he's mainly a celebrity because of his illness. But that's a whole nother rant...
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