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Comment by Angostura | Hacker News Reader

The article doesn't really provide any evidence that he was 'deifyed'

The opening section quotes an anecdote about Hawking referring to his chances of winning a Nobel:

"Most doubtless saw this as an example of Hawking’s famous wit. But in truth it gives a clue to the physicist’s elusive character: shamelessly self-promoting to the point of arrogance, and heedless of what others might think."

Or, more likely, given the context - he was actually being funny and poking fun at his own reputation, as it appears.

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>The article doesn't really provide any evidence that he was 'deifyed'

Deified might be an extreme way of putting it but Mr. Hawking once attended my university to give what looked like a fairly ordinary physics lecture, and not only was the room full to a brim, three other rooms where the lecture was projected were, and people were sitting outside on the grass and watching it on a projector.

If another physics professor of similar caliber had given the lecture I can tell you they would have had trouble to attract a few dozen people.

He undoubtedly was a major celebrity, which I guess in our modern secular times is somewhat like deification. I mean at that time you wouldn't have been able to tell the uni campus apart from a new age cult event. There were people intently listening to the lecture who I know for a fact had not the slightest idea what he was even talking about and just soaking it in like if they were listening to some preacher reciting ancient scripture.

This mystification of science which Hawking stood for always reminds me of a Ted Chiang short story: https://www.nature.com/articles/35014679

I think a large part of it was the sheer mental fortitude that he had to persevere in the face of incredible obstacles while at the same time continuing his scientific work. What he was able to do and accomplish given those challenges was absolutely awe inspiring. I can't imagine that there are many people in the world that would be able to break out of the mental prison that his body put him in and accomplish so much in spite of it.

Also he was pretty charasmatic. Not all scientists, even famous ones, are.

He was a celebrity - he'd been on the Simpsons and Star Trek. People were curious to hear him speak.

That doesn't mean he was deified, or was self aggrandising, or that he stood for the 'mystification of science' - whatever you mean by that.

that “meta science” bit reminds me strongly of the fiction of Peter Watts.

E.g. Siri in blindsight — if I recall, and don’t mix novels, he was a character whose role was as one of a group of people who interpret the post human for the merely human. He was a (meta?)synthesist. Forgot the exact language.

Actually it does, this is from one paragraph from the article (there are more examples, and probably more from the book that the article is a review of):

"Hawking became “as much a brand as he was a person,” says Seife. Billionaire entrepreneurs traded on his name, from Yuri Milner to Richard Branson and Jeffrey Epstein (whose vanity conference on gravity in the Virgin Islands the physicist attended in 2006). In exchange, Hawking was taken on zero-gravity flights and invited to glitzy events and launches. This hawking of Hawking continues today: for a mere £19,000 you can buy a gold watch inlaid, like some medieval jewel-encrusted reliquary bearing a shard of Christ’s cross, with wooden disks “taken from the desk at which Hawking contemplated the mysteries of the universe.”

Made into a brand is not the same as deifycation.

Not just in the literal sense (Pharaohs and some Roman Emperors were actually deified, not Hawking), but also in the metaphorical sense.

Hawkings just had a very striking visual presense and story which was easy to remember (alas, because of his health issues mainly), and so became a stand in for "famous scientist" the average Joe knew, and the press could use a a common interviewee, reference, etc, when talking about physics.

Otherwise people (whether into science or not) didn't care that much about him, nor they had particular esteem for his various views (unlike e.g. with Einstein).

> Made into a brand is not the same as deification.

For some brands it is. I can think of the "Jesus phone".

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