Thread: Stephen Hawking hospitalized, reported very ill

Originally Posted by jockeys

what, not feynman?
Richard Feynman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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I did read Feynman and imo he is a true genius, because he noth has the ability to 'be out there' and to explain it to plebes like us.

He wrote a small book on Quantum Electro Dynamics, called QED which was really good.

This is my favorite quote:

“Suppose we want to subtract 236 from 584. First, count out 584 beans and put them in a pot. Then take out 236 beans and put them on one side. Finally, count the beans left in the pot. That number is the result of subtracting 236 from 584.” You might say, Feynman continues, “Mr. Quetzalcoatl! What a tedium – counting beans, putting them in, taking them out – what a job!” To which the priest would reply: “That’s why we have the rules for the bars and dots. The rules are tricky, but they are a much more
efficient way of getting the answer than by counting beans. The important thing is, it makes no difference as far as the answer is concerned: we can predict the rise of Venus by counting beans (slow, but easy to understand) or by using the tricky rules (which are much faster, but it takes years in school to learn them)”.

He the proceeds to explain QED and the reasons why QT did not work for gravity. And everything makes perfect sense. I still don't grok the math involved, and most likely never will, but when I was reading his book I perfectly understood how to count the beans.

Anyway, I thought we were discussing people that were still alive today. Otherwise I would have mentioned Einstein, Heisenberg and Bohr as well as a couple of others that don't immediately spring to mind.

Originally Posted by jockeys

anyhow, i'm glad he's recovering, they've been holding a vigil of sorts for him over on /. and folks have been discussing his contributions to the world of science. i'm going to have to take the plunge and say the best thing he did to make science accessible to the masses was have the guts to parody himself (repeatedly) on Futurama.

I call this a hawking hole...

Originally Posted by sparq

What do you guys see as his biggest contribution to science? (Let's ignore his storytelling capabilities for the moment)

I think that his work is being heavily discounted in this thread.

The singularities and in particular the no-hair theorem. He did loose that bet with Kip and Preskill though

These are significant contributions, but he is no Feynman or Einstein, or Fermi, Dirac, Heisenberg etc.

Carl Sagan for example was a good scientists but I think his contributions to popularizing science are a lot bigger than those qualifying as new science.

Brian Greene is also a celebrity, and a very good scientist, but not the same league as the top guys.

My girlfriend got to see him lecture at Cal Tech last year. So jealous! I too love me some Feynman. That guy just makes me laugh.