Stephen Hawking vs Richard Feynman

It's sad to say this but it's hard to see anybody after Feynman who can be comparable in terms of insight and importance of his-her contribution, maybe only Murray Gell-Mann being close for his contribution to QCD and the completion of the standard model.

There have been quite a few great ones after Feynman, the problem (or better said, the big difference) is that after QCD and the completion of the standard model in general, all the later developments have been in theoretical areas, without experimental confirmation (I mean big things, of course there have been experimentally confirmed advances but not changing radically the existing theories). That's why I mentioned Gell-Mann in my other post as possibly the latest of those who really changed the big theories. The standard model is the last big theory which so far has passed every experimental test.

But of course there have been very important people, John Wheeler made important contributions to the refinement of quantum theory, Roger Penrose, Alan Guth for the inflationary theory which although not experimentally confirmed is widely supported, George Smoot and his team confirmed experimentally the important fact that the universe expansion is accelerating, Veneziano or Edward Witten in string theory, Leonard Susskind or Lee Smolin in cosmological theories, Zumino and the other guys who developed supersymmetry, David Deutsch made much progress in quantum computing etc etc.

But on one hand, most of these people either did not really make big changes to the existing theories (such as QED or QCD were at their time), or their contributions, while possibly important have remained theoretical without experimental confirmation.

Another thing is that recently most advances are done by teams along certain time, it's not anymore the case that a single guy radically changes physics with his own insight such as Einstein and co did. If you take important recent developments such as supersymmetry, string theory, quantum loop gravity etc, it's hard to pinpoint a single person as the "inventor" or "discoverer", they are usually the result of the sum of several people's work.

Yeah they may not be great physicists themselves but they do a good job at bringing science to the wider public, and this alone is worth a praise for them. Sometimes they exaggerate a bit though, listening to Greene you would think that string theory is the solution to the Theory of Everything question when it is not the case, and Kaku too often makes a shortcut from accepted physics to imaginary possibilities, but OK, it's good that they try to get people interested in science.

 

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Attenborough is not a scientist, he's a TV presenter of nature documentaries.