At some point did the professor stop writing and discussing quantum field theory and general relativity? You can’t just take an online course and pass a test on those subjects so that would be a clue.

Death and faked death and replacing people is a huge logistical pain in the ass. There is the body of Hawking which needs to be disposed and he probably had close to 24/7 medical supervision. Then there is his replacement who is now a missing person. Hawking had relatives who in the case of his impending death are going to want to place their grubby hands on his property. Hawking may have been attended to by dozens of doctors.

There are inevitably going to be a few loose ends even a criminal genius could not have foreseen.

I’m going to play provocateur. The output of scientists declines as they get older with respect to importance, uniqueness, quality and quantity, or so it is widely believed. I don’t think it would be impossible to create fake later Hawking. Far fewer people would be qualified to do it than would be qualified to create, say, fake Sherlock Holmes. But maybe it could have been done. I, personally, have made no effort to analyze the arc of the Hawking oeuvre.

Stephen Hawking’s legal heirs are his three children, the oldest of whom was either 50 or 51 when Hawking died in 2018. The youngest was born in 1979.

Is it possible that Hawking was replaced? Possible, but what evidence is there beyond the assertion that some details of physical appearance changed? I have learned about forensics though. Lack of proof of one thing does not represent proof of another.

Then there’s an even deeper conspiracy to consider. There never was a Stephen Hawking at all. Just a series of doubles and imposters.

If it’s the same person, does ALS cause Dorian Gray syndrome? Would it be worth $1000 to hire a super-recognizer to arbitrate?

I am one. That’s why I understand most people’s theories about faces, especially online, are astonishing crap. Reading conspiracy stuff that’s based on what someone looks like, well it’s like reading the manifesto for the Idiot’s Convention to me. It’s painful. It’s like we are different species of human.

You can rule out in this case that Hawking was swapped simply because his colleagues and care team and everyone else who had contact with him would notice. No one’s going to pull that off. There’s no serious reason to swap him anyway.

In the Western world, with Western personalities, I’m trying to think of any solid example of someone being completely swapped out with a human double by ‘THEM’ and presented to the Western world as if nothing’s changed and that just carries on indefinitely.

It is true here Hawking looks superficially different, but you can find transitional photos.

It’s to do to with:

1) aging

2) the terrible muscular atrophy that’s happened through his condition

3) the disease running its course and the muscles taking on various poses over time, probably based on whatever the last stage of atrophy and pose was, essentially through a path of least resistance.

4) his actual 24/7 care, which may have also contributed to those particular pathways.

5) these pathways of atrophy and rigidity actually accelerating at certain points and then maintaining at other times.

His course of the disease was certainly unusual but not totally beyond the bounds of clinical possibility. Also some people’s ALS actually reverses.

Hawking was a figure that captured the popular imagination and that adds to the mystery.

I expect Unz had some contact with him. He’s mentioned on that paper Unz did.

Hawking may have been attended to by dozens of doctors.

Britain is not America, going by his teeth Hawkings had minimal medical care. only seeing a dentist when a tooth rotted. or a doctor when the chest pains got worse and the tea and aspirin did not work etc etc.

The famous British scifi writer Douglas Adams died at 49 from an ignored medical condition.

Britons esp males are conditioned to not go to the doctor, you get sneered at and disbelieved if complain of a condition. treatment costs money and GPs get bonuses for not treating males.

Tony Blair the socialist being replaced by Tony BLiar the GWOT war monger.

“Faul” McCartney,
years ago when I would leave comment on youtube channels and other sites,
challenging believers as to the veracity of their claim of replacement
citing “before and after” voice print technology.
no one responded,
ever.

Another thought. He’s obviously lost volume in the lower part of the face in his last years which is a main point of the attention. I’m guessing he may have lost most or all of his upper teeth, or had some surgery or some kind of procedure necessitated by his condition that caused that or pushed things further in that direction, but there does seem to be some transitional photos so it probably didn’t happen all at once.

People with serious disability have all kinds of problems ‘they shouldn’t have’ irrespective of care. It actually cost a small fortune to keep Hawking going.

His teeth issues were almost certainly some secondary effect from his condition, probably connected to the fact he couldn’t eat, swallow, spit, cough or breathe without ventilation is my guess. It may have been too risky to even try to clean them and natural processes that would normally happen in the mouth were inhibited.

Ron Unz knew him. In his physics paper he linked he thanked Stephen Hawking for helpful discussions.

I’m sure there was a Stephen Hawking. I was just saying, if someone wanted to launch a conspiracy theory, that would be a good one.

I don’t think there was a fake later Hawking either. Many such theories are floating around. I have two alternate votescam scenarios related to the 2016 presidential election. One of them is that Donald Trump won by a much larger margin, but that the results were fixed to make it as close as possible and leave Trump in a weakened political position.

The other one is that there was some very deep reason why Hillary Clinton could not be allowed to be president. She was then confronted with the evidence and told that they would make it look close to spare her embarrassment, but that she would not be the winner regardless of the actual outcome. In this scenario, she could have been the actual winner or she have legitimately lost. The two scenarios are nor necessarily mutually exclusive.

When I say “very deep reason,” I am envisioning something very serious, not something out of her personal life.

Did it happen? Probably not, but it’s a good c0nspiracy theory. I’ll leave it someone else to further decorate it with embellished, postulated or imaginary facts.

That’s a more reasonable idea.

But I don’t feel compelled that’s what happened based off of the photos we are looking at, and this is why they look different. I think more likely people are just looking at stuff they are not used to seeing and trying to make sense of it, shape it into a pattern as usual.

Apparently there was a paper written about this.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/scd.12665

It’s observational and speculative and not from the West (yes be wary of foreign science), but seems basically reasonable to me. However the same rule applies, that one has to be careful drawing hard conclusions from photos, and it seems the authors are not plastic surgeons, dentists or anything like that.

What’s not controversial at all, is there’s a significant volume loss in the lower part of the face due to loss of teeth. And false teeth were possibly too risky as that paper suggests.That volume loss is shifting how we perceive the upper face. His other facial features seem consistent to me across the years. He has quite a defined antihelix (I think the feature is called) of the ear (which are large) which in his case forms this strong ridge as it meets the antitragus. His nasal features seem very consistent, allowing for aging.

His style of spectacles has also changed over the years, and that will change the reading too.

it seems the authors are not plastic surgeons, dentists or anything like that.

Sorry, my mistake. I had two studies open and looked at the wrong credits. The authors of this piece are dentists/orthodontists and that gives them a far better understanding than the average.

And just ignore what I said about not being Western too.

Just a small point, but I think it would be more likely that a specialized actor could be hired to double for Hawking than it would be that a body double with the same condition could be found and trained.

For one thing, Hawking had a rare case of his condition (ALS) where the disease progressed very slowly. The normal life expectancy of an ALS victim (per a quick search) is two to five years. That doesn’t leave much of a window. Apparently, three years is about average.

> The output of scientists declines as they get older with respect to importance, uniqueness, quality and quantity, or so it is widely believed.

That doesn’t affect general knowledge. A lot of the most knowledgeable people are those who have outlived their creative years but have accumulated a huge store of knowledge which they may even go on adding to. That means that a real Stephen Hawking would still be able to converse in great depth on topics which a fake would flunk very quickly.

That’s all true. What I was getting at is that a foundational scientist’s later output might be able to be faked. What I mean by that is that papers actually produced by someone else could be attributed to the replaced scientist. It’s all kind of a reach. But not impossible. I doubt it’s ever been done in the modern world though.

There are a lot imposter/replacement theories running around. One of them involved Queen Elizabeth I of England. The idea is that Elizabeth, the daughter of Henry VIII, died when she about 11 years old and in the care of some rural lower nobles living outside of London. A local pre-pubescent boy was substituted for her, who then embraced the role. My addition to the theory is that he then had some kind of primitive gender reassignment surgery, not known to Europe physicians, performed by physicians brought in from the Turkey or the Levant, who also provided the aftercare protocols.

The historical record says that Elizabeth experienced a severe fever, but recovered. I don’t believe that she died and was replaced, but I can’t say that it didn’t happen either. Elizabeth’s skeletal remains are entombed. An examination of them would immediately prove or disprove this theory. But an examination will never be allowed.

I’m not going to some other site to click something because I AM NOT YOUR CLICK NIGGER. Post the transcript here and be done with it. Muslims? Fuck that shit. Buncha click nigger rapists.

I’m going to play provocateur. The output of scientists declines as they get older with respect to importance, uniqueness, quality and quantity, or so it is widely believed. I don’t think it would be impossible to create fake later Hawking. Far fewer people would be qualified to do it than would be qualified to create, say, fake Sherlock Holmes. But maybe it could have been done. I, personally, have made no effort to analyze the arc of the Hawking oeuvre.

I bought his “brief history of time” in 1994 and admit to being under the spell of out-there theoretical physics without being able or ambitious enough to fact-check the equations.

It all seemed straight-forward enough, “as this approaches zero that approaches infinity” and so on. Even still I had trouble following the book. So I can’t pretend to judge his work on its merits, so to speak.

I do however, remember growing up in one world (jocks, bullies, life imitating 80s movies) and suddenly finding myself in another circa 1995 or so. The worship of the geek.

It used to be an embarrassment to admit to watching Star Trek. Somewhere around when Hawking made appearances in the “holodeck” on that show, he was part of a change across society – when the scientist type became the celebrity and the rock stars became jokes and charicatures.

Enter the media-created ‘grunge era.’ About the 10th time you hear “Axel Rose did such and such and his own band can’t share a tour bus with him” – even young people sense the smell of bullshit. Especially ones trained in music that recognize music doesn’t change as much as the magazine-defined genres do, that is costume styles.

Plain becomes normal, flashy becomes silly, and suddenly Steven Hawking is not a science book author – he’s a celebrity.

Was he was just better at explaining wild concepts to regular people? Or was he a “bestseller” whom people pretended to comprehend?

Or maybe he’s a lifetime actor, like Dave Grohl, or James Morrison before him.

Hawking became a celbrity. I heard it said, there are two kinds in the male sphere – the matinee idol and the superstar. Hawking was the matinee idol. Einstein was the superstar.

In fact, I once was watching one of those old TV network documentaries about Albert Einstein. The narrator in describing Einstein’s rise to international renown said he was “the first scientist to become an international celebrity.”

Before the word “celebrity” escaped from his mouth, I thought “superstar”. In the 1950s, the word superstar might not even have existed yet.

Maybe that’s why people think Hawking could have had a double. He had passed across the boundary from working scientist to celebrity. Once your becomes theater, why not get someone else to play you?

Ron, there are various points to be made about this and it seems I have to start off with what could seem like a big tangent or two, but I will get back to the case at hand, which is Stephen Hawking, so please bear with me…

Cass Sunstein referred to certain people as being “epistemologically crippled”. Clearly Mr. Sunstein was using the term in a very bizarre way.

Speaking for myself, I would say that the most fundamental epistemological rule would be the following:

If something is simply impossible, then it did not happen.

Take as an example the “debate” (if you can call it that) over the reality of the 9/11 plane crashes. The core argument of the “no-planers” (of which your regular columnist Laurent Guyénot and myself are examples) is that the videos of the plane crashing into the building portray something that is simply physically impossible. Therefore, it did not happen. Period. Full stop.

Frankly, it is hard to understand what the counter-argument of the “planers” (of which Kevin Barrett and yourself are examples) because the “planers” are tacitly assuming that the plane crashes as described and portrayed in 50-odd videos are physically possible. However, unlike the people on the other side of the debate, they never explain WHY it is possible. Clearly, if it is possible, the other side of the debate must be making some key mistake in their reasoning and you need to explain what that mistake is, no? (Yet you never do that!)

The same basic problem applies to the moon landing debate. People on the “hoaxer” side (again, Laurent Guyénot and myself are examples) are making arguments that the story is simply impossible. Ergo, it did not happen.

In both the above cases, the debate centers around whether the official narrative is even physically possible.

Now, the Hawking case, in deep structure, is not really very different. The core problem is that the most fundamental fact about the case, on moderately careful examination, appears be straight-out impossible, i.e. that Hawking lived with ALS for 55 years. (Or, assuming that it is “possible” in the sense of having a non-zero probability, that probability is so infinitesimal that it could be treated as impossible without doing any particular violence to reality, like winning a coin-flip bet 100 times in a row maybe.)

And this does seem to be borne out by the fact that, out of many thousands of cases, simply NOBODY ever lived that long with ALS. Except Hawking…

So, how do we examine the case? AFAICS it is largely a question of coming to some understanding of actuarial mathematics. I don’t know whether you have ever eyeballed an actuarial table. Here is one for the United States:

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

Here are some interesting facts from that table. As I recall, Ron, you are a 63-year-old male. As you can see from the row corresponding to your age group, out of a sample of 100,000 males born in the U.S. in the same year as you, there would be currently 77,582 who are still alive. The probability of you, a 63-year-old male, dying in the next 12 months is about 1.76%. One can also extrapolate that your probability of survival for the next ten years is about 78.7%. (This is obtained by dividing the number in the third column for 73 years old by the number in the third column for 63 years old. That is 61,080/77,582.)

Similarly, we can extrapolate that, assuming you survive the next ten years to the age of 73, your chance of surviving a further 10 years to 83 is about 58%. Thus, you have a better than even money chance of surviving a further ten years, but 58% is substantially less than 78%, right?

Assuming you make it this far, your chance for surviving a further ten years to the age of 93 is about 21.6%. Assuming you beat the odds and make it to 93, the probability of surviving a further ten years, to the age of 103, though not zero, is now pretty small. It is about 2.2%.

Of course, if we combine all of this, we see that your chance of surviving the next 40 years from this point is about 0.22%. As for your chances of reaching 113, i.e. surviving the next 50 years, it really is just about zero. But it is still a positive number, since some sliver of the population does reach that age, but is considerably less than 1 in a million.

The above is an example of actuarial math, what I would tend to call “grim reaper logic”. Now, getting back to Hawking, it is a known fact that appears on the Wikipedia page on ALS that the probability of somebody with ALS surviving the firstdecade> with that condition is only about 10%. This is a degenerative illness in which the same “grim reaper logic” surely applies — except, note that it is kicking in MUCH FASTER. The probability of survival for a single decade is only about 10%. The probability of survival for the subsequent decade is hard to figure, but from my own investigation I conclude that it is not more than 1 in 40.

As for the third decade, it must be much lower even than that. There might be a single digit number of cases of people who have survived 3 decades with, out of many thousands of cases. But note that, to survive 55 years with ALS, you have to survive those 3 decades and then another quarter of a century.

The article by you-know-who about Stephen Hawking lays out the sheer impossibility of Hawking living that long with ALS. Simple numeracy surely suggests that you-know-who’s argument is fundamentally correct. Even if you do a bit of special pleading and point out that the onset of Hawking’s ALS was at a younger age, so he had a somewhat better prognosis than average, it does not seem that this will overcome the powerful grim reaper logic that applies. He (and nobody with ALS) is going to be alive over 5 decades later!

Now, I guess this is still open to debate. I am not a professional statistician or epidemiologist or whatever. I am just using basic numeracy here and coming to a conclusion. And that conclusion is that it is effectively impossible for Hawking to have survived with ALS for 55 years. I mean, look, I go through the actuarial data and apply it to the case of a 63-year-old male such as yourself. You’re not starting off with a probabilty of 10% of surviving the very first decade! Your chance of surviving the first decade out is very good! Almost 80%. But each subsequent decade gets harder. And it’s not about you personally, Ron. There is a steady deterioration (i.e. life itself is effectively a degenerative, terminal condition) and you see how the probability of survival for each successive decade steadily drops.

So I draw the conclusion that Hawking surviving 55 years with ALS is either utterly impossible or something of such low probability that it might as well be treated as an impossibility.

But the issue came up a couple of months ago, and although I thought that the “replacement� theory was total nonsense,

Okay, fine. But note that I came to the opposite conclusion, that Hawking surviving 55 years with ALS was total nonsense. Except there is the difference, which is that I am sharing my reasoning, while you are just making an assertion with no facts or logic behind it. Right?

But anyway, I am trying to understand your overall argument, such as it is, and it is hard to follow, frankly. For example:

So isn’t it plausible that he might have a stand-in, someone who took his place at some of those appearances? Given his very serious ALSbeing very seriously dead someone else with that same condition might look enough like him to pass muster with most audiences.

The above is what you wrote, though I do make an editorial suggestion…

On the face of it is, it does not seem like you are making an argument in favor of Hawking having survived 55 years. You are making the argument that they could get away with using a replacement, no? But you are presumably arguing that Hawking was alive the whole time, yet…

Well, Ron, you understand surely what an “own goal” is, right? Aren’t you scoring an “own goal” here, Ron?