It was just announced today that physicist Stephen Hawking was awarded the Copley medal. This is the highest award for scientific acheivement and has been awarded to people like Einstein, Darwin and Pasteur. The Copley medal was first awarded in 1731 by the Royal Society, Britain's elite scientific academy.

"Stephen Hawking has contributed as much as anyone since Einstein to our understanding of gravity," said the society's president, Lord Rees. "This medal is a fitting recognition of an astonishing research career spanning more than 40 years."

I think Stephen Hawking is one of the most incredible human beings to ever live on this planet. His contributions to science are huge. It is unbelieveable that a person with his physical disabilities can do what he has done. His writings, thoughts and hypothesis will be discussed and referred to for many years.

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I read a Brief History of Time when I was in college, and you realize what a rare genius he is.

Hawking will go down in history as one of the giants in science, at the same level as other greats, like Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein.

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Paul S.

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A friend's dad is an astro physicist and says most of Hawkin's stuff has been stolen from others. How true this is, I don't know, but he hates with him the passion of a burning sun (see what I did there?!).

Ted Nugent has a following in your household and Hawking is a fraud. That's rich!

Here is a brief passage from Wikipedia on Stephen Hawking. I wonder what parts of Hawkings research your friend's dad believes Hawking stole from others.... :

Hawking's principal fields of research are theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity.

In the late 1960s, he and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, applied a new, complex mathematical model they had created from Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. This led, in 1971, to Hawking proving the first of many singularity theorems; such theorems provide a set of sufficient conditions for the existence of a singularity in space-time. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in special cases, singularities are a fairly generic feature of general relativity.

Hawking also suggested that, after the Big Bang, primordial or mini black holes were formed. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four Laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should thermally create and emit subatomic particles, known as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.

In collaboration with Jim Hartle, Hawking developed a model in which the Universe had no boundary in space-time, replacing the initial singularity of the classical Big Bang models with a region akin to the North pole; while one cannot travel North of the North pole, there is no boundary there. While originally the no-boundary proposal predicted a closed Universe, discussions with Neil Turok led to the realization that the no-boundary proposal is consistent with a Universe which is not closed also.

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Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Following is a list of awards Hawkings has received.

I wonder, if all of these medals should be returned, if your friend's father is correct that his work is simply borrowed from others.....



1975 Eddington Medal
1976 Hughes Medal of the Royal Society
1979 Albert Einstein Medal
1982 Order of the British Empire (Commander)
1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society
1986 Member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences
1988 Wolf Prize in Physics
1989 Prince of Asturias Awards in Concord
1989 Companion of Honour
1999 Julius Edgar Lilienfeld Prize of the American Physical Society
2003 Michelson Morley Award of Case Western Reserve University
2006 Copley Medal of the Royal Society

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Paul S.

2001 E430, Bourdeaux Red, Oyster interior.
79,200 miles.

1973 280SE 4.5, 170,000 miles. 568 Signal Red, Black MB Tex. "The Red Baron".

Its his friend's father, but that aside, I know that Nugent had the 1985 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society locked up and Hawking came and stole it while Ted was out on the Cat Scratch Fever Tour.

Which was the result doubtless of Nugent shooting a mountain lion with a sporterised semi-auto .50 cal BAR,since all of academe knows Einstein's theories of motion were liberally cribbed by Nugent,who based his trajectory and choice of weapon upon it,even had the effrontery to write a festschrift he presented to Caltech and Geneva,THAT really pissed Hawking off.

Boy was he hoppin' mad when he saw those wheelchair tracks in the mud.

You guys crack me up.
Don't shoot the messenger though, I was merely re-itterating what I had been told. It means nothing to me - physics is waaay above my head.

I always found him kind of stiff.

B

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=411781&in_page_id=1770

It was Elaine’s former husband, engineer David Mason, who made the voicebox which created the robot-like vocal tone for which Prof Hawking is now famous.

From the start, say friends, she set out to ingratiate herself with him, and, over a period of time, the family noticed the mesmeric hold the 'new nurse' was beginning to exert over her charge, and felt deeply uneasy.

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No he will certainly not be held in that regard based on his accomplishments to date. I have as much or more respect for Hawking as the next guy, but his work hasn't been nearly as extraordinary or revolutionary as the historical greats you've noted. I see him as more of a great communicator, such as Carl Sagan and Asimov.

I agree with Germanstar. Hawkings is a communicator. And a thinker, no doubt. But, he still doesn't know what gravity is.

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