There once was a man with incredible insight into fools. Douglas Adams noted in his book, "Mostly Harmless," that "[a] common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools."
Someone else, whose name is quite difficult to find said, "Who is the greater fool? The fool or the fool who follows him?"
I have stated on several occasions that Albert Einstein was a complete idiot, but by the common wisdom, we must admit that Stephen Hawking was an even greater idiot for blindly following Einstein. The incredible hero worship surrounding Hawking's death is, or would be amusing if it weren't so foolish.
Imagine, if you will, that once upon a time, there was nothing. No, not empty space, just...um, Nothing. In the center of Nothing was an infinitely tiny, infinitely hot, inifinitely dense balloon that just all the sudden blew itself up. Keep in mind that despite having all these "infinite" PHYSICAL characteristics, it was as much Nothing as the Nothing it didn't inhabit, and like all balloons I've ever seen, it blew itself up with Nothing to become Something (i.e. - the Universe).
This balloon blew itself up between 13 and 14 billion years ago, and we have spent an astronomical amount of money trying to see the light from this event, even though no one seems to know how we got in front of the light so we could be in position to see it. And since we don't seem to be able to see it, then there must have been a celestial Dark Ages where no light existed, even though it existed when the balloon blew itself up, and it existed after the Dark Ages.
Now, this Balloon is floating somewhere in the middle of Nothing, and there are possibly many other balloons around it, though the only proof of that is some numerical wizardry performed by Einstein and Hawking. There are three possibilities for this Balloon: k=1; k=0, and k=-1. In human speak, this translates to a balloon that will expand forever, one that remain exactly as it is forever, and one that is/will contract back to Nothing and presumably blow itself back up again. Inside this balloon, there are things we can't explain without resorting to electricity and magnetism, so the scientidiots invented Dark Matter and Dark Energy: Dark Matter because galaxies don't spin the way Hawking's numbers do, and Dark Energy because scientidiots think the balloon is expanding faster the further away it gets from Earth.
Never mind that both of these things have been completely debunked by their own tools in the past three years.
Now, since the Universe doesn't use electricity and magnetism, unlike every piece of technology humankind has devised, we apparently need Black Holes. Now, you may not know this, but there are four kinds of Black Holes, two of which are named after Stephen Hawking, not because he found them, but because he manipulated magical symbols, glyphs and ciphers in a way no one else had thought to do.
These Black Holes are "Settled Science," even though there is no such thing, and despite the fact that the "evidence" we have for them is the radiation they give off, even though their gravity is infinite and they absorb everything around them, including all radiation of every kind. Also, ignore the fact that Black Hole calculations require assuming only ONE MASS in the entire Universe. I don't know about you, but I do know I exist and I am standing on a rock, so that is at least two masses I am fairly sure about.
These scientidiots didn't like the fact that you can't divide something by nothing, so they called it infinity, which is not a number. No problem, since the square-root of -1 is "i", right? If you get the impression that Cosmology is inventing the rules of the game as you go along to ensure that you win, you're getting the right idea.
Yes, this Hawking feller was a genius, I tell ya. He could explain gravity using gravity. He could conjure infinity out of nothing. He could create Black Holes where none existed.
Don't get me wrong. Hawking managed to survive 50 years longer than other scientidiots ever though he would with his disease, and he managed to befuddle so many people with his wizarding skills that he finagled a fairly comfortable lifestyle for himself and breathless sainthood upon his death. I can respect a good scam, while condemning the desire and ability to scam so many gullible people.
Hawking managed to turn Dark Ages, Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Black Holes into money, and that's no small feat. He was able to take circular arguments and make them look like they led somewhere. He was able to conjure Universes out of Nothing and make it seem plausible. Plausible, that is, until you start picking at the scabs and looking at the festering assumptions underneath.
Yes, Stephen Hawking was a genius, all right, but not in the way most people think of him. He was a Master Scientidiot, and we can concede a certain amount of congratulations for his skill at bamboozling. As someone put it to me years ago, there are bullshitters and bullshit artists. Hawking was most certainly in the latter category.
And he did it by overcoming a fairly significant handicap, but one has to wonder how much leeway he was given for that one fact.
Mathematical wizardry has its place in telling us what is possible, but at some point you have to look up from the ciphering and see what is probable. I will grant that looking up was not an easy task for Hawking, but at some point in his 50-year career as a scientidiot, one imagines that he should have tried.
It is not enough to say you follow a greater fool. Reality, no matter how much we try, is an immutable fact that cannot be ciphered away, nor can facts be created by books full of dancing symbols.
Maps are useful tools, when they are correct, but they can also lead you off a cliff if you don't look up to check reality once in a while.
Hawking, like Einstein before him, was a map-maker who got carried away with his fanciful designs. He forgot to check the lay of the land once in a while, and for that he can be faulted without diminishing the artistry of his skills. After all, Picasso never called himself a portrait artist, and to their credit, neither did the glitterati.
Let's give Hawking credit for what he achieved, but let's be a little less breathless and gullible about what his achievements actually were.
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