Stephen Hawking vs. Karl Popper
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Stephen Hawking
1942 – 2018
Stephen William Hawking was an English theoretical astrophysicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.
"My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.", December 12, 2004)]"
Karl Popper
1902 – 1994
Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification made possible by his falsifiability criterion, and for founding the Department of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can be scrutinised with decisive experiments.
"In speaking of sociological laws or natural laws of social life I have in mind such laws as are formulated by modern economic theories, for instance, the theory…"
Connections
Both wrote about: