A Great Scientist
Great scientists are by definition bold, introducing ideas that challenge conventional wisdom. The best of them are also humble, able to see the importance of hammering their hypotheses with real-world tests, then being the first to admit when they’re wrong.
Galileo Galilei, for instance, boldly wrote “I have observed” (rather than the more typically cautious “I conjecture” or “I hypothesize”) that Saturn is not one but three objects. But he kept peering at the mysterious body, which he called a “star,” and when the objects (which we now know are rings) seemed to disappear one day, he publicly wondered: “Has Saturn devoured his children? Or was it indeed an illusion and a fraud with which the lenses of my telescope deceived me for so long?”
Physicist Stephen Hawking similarly backed away from earlier observations last week, acknowledging, among other things, that his 1980s theory that black holes might offer passage into an alternate universe was mistaken.
Admitting mistakes isn’t easy for any of us, and this is especially true of scientists. It can be hard to tell your benefactors that the avenue of inquiry they let you pursue for decades is a dead end. And, as the historian Thomas Kuhn argued in his 1962 classic “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” science, like any trade, is at bottom a clique that reserves its warmest embrace for those who affirm rather than challenge its conventions.
Hawking’s latest thinking isn’t easy to follow -- not only for those of us laypeople who tried to decipher it from afar but for authorities in the field who heard him outline it on Wednesday. As John Preskill, the Caltech particle physicist who had bet Hawking that his black hole theory would prove to be wrong, admitted, “I’ll be honest. I didn’t understand the talk.”
One problem is that what Hawking is trying to do may be beyond the ken of any contemporary physicist. Hawking’s key ambition has been to square Einstein’s general relativity, a form of physics describing the very big, with quantum mechanics, physics describing the very small.
Attempts by many scientists to square the two have been disastrous, with the equations breaking down into gibberish.
But a second, subtler problem is that Hawking (or at least the authors and filmmakers who have made him into a celebrity) has tried to do something even more difficult than figure out nature: satisfy humans’ desire to understand it. Hawking has long been a darling of science fiction fans because he has tried much harder than most scientists to boil abstruse theories down to show how they might answer questions that grip the popular imagination, like time travel.
Those problems would be hard for anyone to solve, much less someone who cannot walk, talk or type more than one slow letter at a time because he has suffered for decades from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
But what makes Hawking, like Galileo, worthy of the often glibly assigned adjective “great,” even if all his theories prove wrong one day, is both his boldness of ambition and his frankness about failure.
