On March 14, 2018, Stephen Hawking, a British physicist and legend of contemporary science, died at the age of 76.
As a scientist, I do not intend to repeat the cliche or misinformation that is often transmitted to the public, but rather hope to present to the public as clearly and accurately as possible the practical achievements of Hawking.
The first, and the most fundamental, question.
What is Hawking's scientific success?
The basic answer is: Hawking is a remarkable scientist. If you say he is a great scientist, I will not object to it.
But the media has often called him the greatest scientist since Einstein, the greatest scientist in the world, and so on. I was once asked, "Why did the scientific community recognize Hawking as the greatest scientist since Einstein?" My heart was broken, and I couldn't help but ask him, "who told you it was accepted by the scientific community?" The scientific community doesn't think so at all, okay? "
In fact, one obvious indicator is that Hawking doesn't even have a Nobel Prize. How could he be the greatest scientist in the world?
This leads to the second question, which is often asked: why didn't Hawking win the Nobel Prize?
The answer was simple: because his work did not reach the Nobel Prize level. It's not because the Nobel committee is biased or political, but for purely scientific reasons.
The third question arises:
What is Hawking's most important research achievement?
To answer this question, there must be some scientific terminology. As Hawking notes in a brief History of time, each formula frightens half the reader. However, if you really want to know the answer to this question, I would like you to read the following explanation patiently, and I am sure you can learn a basic picture from it.
Hawking's field of study is mainly cosmology, which is a science, not philosophy. Yes, the study of the universe is now not a philosopher's business, but a scientist's business. Instead of thinking about the question of "is the universe finite or infinite" through philosophical debates such as "two Children's Day", people study the universe empirically and quantitatively through observation and theory.
The theory used in cosmology, first of all, Einstein's general relativity, Hawking's application of general relativity has made a lot of contributions. Later, it was discovered that quantum mechanics, another basic physics theory parallel to general relativity, was also needed, and Hawking also made a lot of contributions and was more important in this regard.
Hawking has a lot of scientific achievements, and if you have to choose one of the most prominent, it should be Hawking radiation. What was Hawking talking about?
We know that general relativity predicts an object called a black hole. The mass of a black hole is so large that the gravity around it is so strong that even light cannot escape, and other matter, which is slower than light, naturally cannot escape. The matter outside the black hole is likely to be sucked in by the black hole. It can be seen that the black hole, like the legend of the Pixu, can be said to be "absolutely black".
In daily life, people often use ecological black hole, financial black hole and so on, to show how deeply the concept of black hole is. As a modern scientific term, black holes really create a communication miracle.
But Hawking pointed out: black holes are not inaccessible, black holes are not absolute black!
His reasoning is that, traditionally, black holes have been studied only in general relativity. But when you add quantum mechanics, you will find that everywhere in space, there are many pairs of particles and antiparticles that occur and annihilate in an instant. What seems to be a vacuum, in fact, is a surging undercurrent, countless particles counter-particle square, flowing ceaselessly. The same is true at the boundary of the black hole.
Well, maybe now the black hole has sucked in an instantaneous particle on the boundary. At the same time, the antiparticle, which should have been annihilated with that particle, will not be annihilated now, and it appears in the world as a persistent, real particle. From the outside observer's point of view, it is equivalent to a black hole emitting an anti-particle!
According to this theory, black holes do emit matter. This effect is called Hawking radiation. Black holes are not bound to grow, and may become smaller and eventually disappear. This is really a great shock to people's ideas and ideas!
You must have asked the fourth question: why didn't Hawking get the Nobel Prize?
The answer is: this is just a theoretical prediction and has not been verified by experiments. Nobel Prize selection is very careful, must choose those who have been proven, recognized results. That's why Tu won't win until decades after the discovery of artemisinin, as it waited until artemisinin became the world's first anti-malaria drug of choice. Even if so discreet, and sometimes wrong, the Nobel committee is also a lot of pressure.
In fact, let's not say that Hawking radiation is such a correction to the black hole theory, even the existence of the black hole itself, there is no direct experimental evidence! Of course, the vast majority of scientists believe in the existence of black holes, because there is already a lot of indirect evidence. This is like gravitational waves, which were believed by most scientists long before the first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015, because the indirect evidence was sufficient.
Even if Hawking's radiation is tested experimentally and Hawking wins the Nobel Prize, we can still point out that Hawking's achievements are mainly improved within the existing framework, which is good, but compared with those who have proposed new frameworks, Or at least one level lower.
Who has proposed a new framework? Newton, for example, proposed Newton's mechanics. Maxwell, put forward the electromagnetic theory. Einstein proposed special and general relativity. Planck, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, proposed quantum mechanics. Yang Zhenning, put forward normative field theory. Yes, according to professionals, Yang Zhenning's scientific achievements are at least one level higher than Hawking's. This certainly does not mean any disrespect, just to do an objective analysis, reflecting an industry consensus.
This raises the fifth question: if Hawking's scientific achievements are not as great as many media say, why is he so famous?
The answer is: Hawking's high fame, on the one hand, comes from his outstanding contribution to science, but it comes more from three other factors.
The first factor is his professional field, cosmology. Although most people lack the expertise in cosmology, almost everyone is naturally interested in cosmology, and everyone likes to comment on it. In this respect, one can only say that some disciplines are self-directed, while others are less fortunate. For example, my major, theory and computational chemistry, most people have never heard of such a subject, even if the public want to ask questions, they do not know what to ask.
The second factor is Hawking's legendary illness and spirit. Hawking's disease, known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is often referred to as "actinomycosis." the 2014 campaign, Ice Bucket Challenge, was originally intended to draw attention to the disease.
When many people first met Hawking, though prepared for the first time, they were stunned by the extent of his disability. This is true of Hawking's Chinese student, Wu Zhongchao, the Chinese translator of A brief History of time, which Hawking is accustomed to.
In such extreme incarceration of the body, Hawking's mind is so free that it has always been concerned about the fundamental problems of the whole universe. What a moving hero it is! there is a line in Hamlet: "even if I were locked in a fruit shell, I would think of myself as a king with infinite space."-Hamlet. This spirit is fully reflected in Hawking. In fact, Hawking wrote a popular science book after a brief History of time, called the Universe in the Fruit Shell.
The third most interesting factor is Hawking's work on popular science. If Hawking's achievements in scientific research are only remarkable, and many people are above him, then his achievements in science popularization are divine. "A brief History of time" has sold hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. Created a myth in the history of popular science. This is also a great inspiration for popular science writers all over the world.
This leads to the sixth question: how about the book "A brief History of time"?
The answer is: I appreciate this book very much and have learned a lot from it. In fact, although Hawking has tried to make so many esoteric topics easy to understand, the difficulty of these things lies there. Most readers read the book and I'm afraid they won't be able to read it from scratch. I have a joke: for most readers, perhaps the most interesting question is, "from which chapter do you not understand?"
Even so, the most amazing thing is that even if they don't understand, most people still have to read it, and even if they don't, they still buy one on the shelf. Even to decorate the facade, science is used to decorate the facade, indicating that the reader knows the greatness of science. To achieve this effect, the role of popular science has been achieved more than half. As a saying goes: hypocrisy is the highest salute to good from evil!
From the point of view of writing, Hawking's writing method is carefully chosen, reaching a rare balance between accuracy and popularity, and even writes such a very hard work on popular science very charismatic. Chinese writers have many stories of refining sentences, such as "thinking", and Hawking must have done a lot of them. This is worthy of the world's popular science writers to learn carefully and conscientiously.
One of the main points in the brief History of time is probably something that non-professional readers are not aware of. In the last few chapters, introducing the latest developments in cosmology and Hawking's own work, I can see that one of the fundamental ideas driving Hawking is his extreme aversion to theism. As for the question of divinity or atheism, Hawking, like many scientists, does not think the issue is important, or simply generally supports atheism or agnosticism, but rather supports atheism very clearly. Oppose theism. To what extent? Many of his studies were motivated by a more thorough expulsion of the idea of God. In this sense, Hawking is not only an atheist, but also a fighting atheist, like Fan Zhen, Diderot, Richard Dawkins and others in history.
A typical example is his important work in his later years, "borderless Boundary conditions," that is, the idea that the boundary conditions of the universe are "borderless". This gives a natural answer to the question of "what happened before the Big Bang," because space-time is a four-dimensional sphere, just like the surface of the Earth, where no point is a boundary, no point is special. The Big Bang is like the Earth's South Pole, and you think it's special, just because you use the coordinate system to make it the southernmost end, and it's totally man-made. If you change the coordinate system, you will find that this point is in the same position as any other point. So there was nothing before the Big Bang, because the Big Bang had no "before," as if it could no longer go south from the South Pole. I'm sorry, because of space constraints, we can't explain this problem in more detail here, for example, what the word "time and space" means. Interested readers can refer to my articles, such as listening to three Nobel laureates talk about gravity waves.
The seventh question is: Hawking has often made some strange or unreliable statements in recent years. Has he become a goon? Or are they controlled by some group behind them and become puppets of these people?
The answer is: no.
The so-called Hawking unreliable remarks, more than half of which were made up by the media, Hawking never said. These mischievous media are so despicable that such silly speculation can only reflect the low level of knowledge and morality of these people.
Others are indeed what Hawking said, if not exactly true, at least seriously. It's normal for some people to disagree with these statements, but they think it's a stick or a puppet that doesn't agree with themselves, and that's too much of a brain supplement.
Hawking, or any famous scientist, should be neither deified nor stigmatized, and treated objectively and calmly. His point of view, if you think it makes sense, refer to it. If you think it doesn't make sense, if you don't listen, why do you have to think of a conspiracy theory? After all, a great man becomes a great man not because he did something wrong, but because he did something right.
There is no doubt that Hawking has become a great contemporary figure.
Liu Cixin has a short story called "Chao Wen Dao", in which there is Hawking. The novel says that humans have built a super-accelerator that surrounds the entire earth, called the Einstein Equator. When the accelerator was about to start, an alien suddenly appeared to stop us. The alien tells the Earth that this accelerator is too energetic and may cause the vacuum to decay and destroy the entire universe. His mission is to monitor the intelligent life of the universe and eliminate this danger.
The Earthman asked: when did you notice the Earth?
The adventurers replied: three hundred and seventy thousand years ago, when 10 primitive men looked up to the stars and exceeded the warning threshold, they showed sufficient curiosity about the universe.
The Earthman asked: does it not mean that an early warning system will only alert when a civilization capable of generating the energy process of the Genesis energy level appears?
The adventurer replied: when life realizes the existence of the mystery of the universe, it is only one step away from finally unlocking it. For example, it took more than four billion years for life on Earth to realize for the first time the existence of the mysteries of the universe, but it was less than four hundred thousand years before you built Einstein's equator. The most critical acceleration period for this process is less than 500 years. If the primitive gazed for a few minutes to see a jewel, then your so-called human civilization was merely stooping to pick it up.
Liu Cixin's reasoning here is thought-provoking. Curiosity is a human nature and unstoppable. Through science, the greatest cause of mankind, human beings can still enjoy spiritual freedom even if they are confined to the fruit shell.
Pascal's famous passage is our most appropriate memory of Hawking:
"Thoughts form the greatness of man. Man is nothing more than a reed, the most fragile thing in nature; but he is a sly grass that can think. It is impossible to use a weapon to destroy him in the whole universe; one breath, one The dripping water is enough to kill him. However, even if the universe destroys him, man is still much more expensive than the thing that caused him to die; because he knows that he wants to die, and the advantage that the universe has for him, and the universe This is nothing to know.
Therefore, all our dignity lies in thought. It is because of it, not because of the space and time that we cannot fill, that we must improve ourselves. Therefore, we must strive to think well; this is the moral principle. "
Yuan Lanfeng is a Ph. D. in Chemistry from China University of Science and Technology, Associate Research fellow of Hefei National Laboratory of Micro-scale material Science and Technology of China University of Science and Technology, President of Science, Technology and Strategic Wind and Cloud Science, and Director of Social responsibility Alliance of Young scientists.