Review of new books by physicists Hawking and Martin Rees

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: John Horgan <jhorgan () stevens edu>
> Date: October 21, 2018 23:19:26 JST
> To: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> Subject: Review of new books by physicists Hawking and Martin Rees
>
> Dave, FYI my Wall Street Journal critique of books by physics titans Stephen Hawking and Martin Rees. John Horgan
>
> We’re still waiting to solve the riddle of existence—with no sign today’s physicists are on the right track.
>
>  
>
> A high point of my career as a science journalist was a cosmology workshop I bulled my way into in 1990. Thirty 
> luminaries of physics gathered in a rustic resort in northern Sweden to swap ideas about how our universe was born. 
> Stephen Hawking, although almost entirely paralyzed, was the id of the meeting, a joker with a Mick Jagger smirk. 
> Martin Rees, cool and elegant, was the superego, as befitting a future president of the Royal Society, one of 
> science’s most venerable institutions…
>
>
> One afternoon everyone piled into a bus and drove to a local church to hear a concert. As the scientists proceeded 
> down the center aisle of the packed church, led by Hawking in his wheelchair, parishioners stood and applauded. These 
> churchgoers seemed to be acknowledging that science was displacing religion as the source of answers to the deepest 
> mysteries, like why we exist.
>
>
> That scene came to mind as I read two new books, “Brief Answers to the Big Questions,” by Hawking and “On the Future: 
> Prospects for Humanity” by Mr. Rees. The authors’ styles differ—Hawking cocky, Rees sober—but the substance of their 
> books overlaps. They offer brisk, lucid peeks into the future of science and of humanity. They evince a profound 
> faith in science’s power to demystify nature and bend it to our ends…. Yet reading these books was a bittersweet 
> experience, and not only because Hawking died last March, at 76... The works resemble relics from a long-gone golden 
> age: The high priests of science no longer enjoy the prestige they did just a few decades ago…
>
>
>
> Continue at 
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/brief-answers-to-the-big-questions-and-on-the-future-review-serious-doubt-on-serious-earth-1539909146



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