Hawking, Stephen, physical

John von Neuman, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, believed that the sciences, in essence, do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret they mainly make models. By a model he meant a mathematical construct that, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. Stephen Hawking also believes that physical theories are just mathematical models we construct and that it is meaningless to ask whether they correspond to reality, just as it is to ask whether they predict observations. 

What was called applied mathematics in England was really theoretical physics. At the time only experimental physics was taught in physics departments. Traces of this system remain to this day. For example, the British physicist Stephen Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, not a professor of physics. 

Fields of interest adsorption, catalysis, cavitation, nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, shock waves, nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, physical cosmology, and general relativity. Andrei Sakharov named him a man of universal scientific interests and Stephen W. Hawking said to Zel dovich Before I met you here, I believed you to be a collective author , like Bourbaki. See also Zel dovich theory in -> nucleation, subentry -> non-stationary nucleation, and -> Roginskii-Zeldovich kinetics in adsorption kinetics. 

Galileo (1564-1642) is called the father of modern science. Albert Einstein called Galileo the father of modern physics—indeed of modern science altogether. Stephen Hawking has stated, Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science. Here, a brief biography and... 

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