A few days ago, a remarkable human being left this life. Professor
Stephen Hawking, one of Newton’s successors as the Lucasian Professor at the
University of Cambridge (from 1979 to 2009), cosmologist, space tourist and
author, died at the age of 76. His scientific output was prodigious and ground
breaking, from his 1965 PhD thesis, “Properties of Expanding Universes”, to his
2017 paper “A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?”. His popular output has made
him a familiar name to many who knew nothing of physics. His 1988 book “A Brief
History of Time”, was a best seller, and in the last week has shot back up
Amazon’s best seller table (I’ve just looked and it’s currently #2). Among other places, he popped up in Star Trek
and The Simpsons. He was all the more remarkable because much of what he
accomplished, he accomplished from wheelchair. At the age of 21 he was
diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the most common form of motor
neurone disease. Originally told he only had a few years to live, it turned out
that he was in the small group of ALS sufferers who survive more than 10 years
after diagnosis. But latterly he had lost all power of movement in his limbs
and lost the ability to speak, so he communicated by means of a computer
interface that allowed him to type via a cursor activated by twitching a cheek
muscle. It was slow and laborious, but it allowed him to continue to make an impact
on the world beyond his wheelchair, and the sound of his electronic voice was
widely and instantly recognisable. He did so much more than grudgingly and
grimly survive. His passing will be felt most severely by his family and close
friends. Then there will be that wider circle of friends and colleagues in
Physics, and science more generally, who will miss and mourn him. And beyond
that a much wider circle who will feel poorer for his passing. That’s all as it
should be.
He was an expert. His specific expertise was in cosmology,
working on how the universe came into existence and developed, carrying out
basic and elegant work on those most mysterious objects in the universe, black
holes. He used the mathematics of the infinitely small, and applied it to the
really big. If you get the impression I’m being a bit vague, that’s because the
maths involved, as well as many of the concepts, are well beyond me. But I’m
not alone. I suppose this applies to the vast bulk of humanity. This got me
thinking about expertise. Many of us can appreciate and value Stephen Hawking’s expertise. Rather than resenting it, we can accept it, respect it. Some have been inspired by it. In part, maybe this is because of his very human story of achievement in the face of the most difficult of life circumstances. Rather than give up when confronted with essentially a death sentence, he persevered. That is impressive. Maybe it’s because his expertise was of a particular non-threatening sort. After all, as important as his work on black holes is, most of us can live quite happily in ignorance of it, with it making no personal demands on us. It has no influence on how we live, or spend, or vote. It’s the sort of thing most us are very clear we have no understanding of. There’s no question of our opinion on anything to do with black holes having any weight at all compared to Stephen Hawking’s. Most of us would accept that his expertise and knowledge were unquestionable, whereas ours is miniscule or non-existent. Perhaps it gets tricky when expertise is more questionable or its implications closer to home.
Expertise that has implications for how we think or how we live seems to be under attack (see Tom Nichol’s essay “The death of expertise”). In the blogosphere, in the media (social and otherwise), even in the street, we no longer defer to experts even when the issues are relatively technical. And of course some seem happy to keep us away from actual knowledge and to glory in ignorance (something discussed here). We have the spread of fake news (or at least the constant claim that a particular piece of news is fake) and fake facts. It emerged this week that a certain prominent politician made up a “fact” stated as a truth.
But this approach strikes me of having at its heart a
strange double standard. In cosmology, medicine and aviation (to mention a few)
we are happy to recognise, trust and rely on experts. Black holes may be remote
objects with little direct impact on us, but knowing your surgeon can tell your
tonsils from your toes, or that your pilot can successfully lower the
undercarriage before landing, is clearly important. We accept that true facts
matter in these domains, and that fake facts (your tonsils are on the end of
your foot) have potentially serious consequences. Why then the unwillingness to
accept expertise in other matters? Maybe it’s because a little knowledge is a dangerous
thing; it leads to the kind of hubris that claims that we can all be experts. And
of course a little knowledge is only mouse click away. All opinions can then become expert opinions that must be taken equally seriously.
The answer to this is not so much a new deference but old
fashioned humility; humility to recognise skill and expertise in others, and
therefore give their opinions more weight than my own within their areas of
expertise. This doesn’t mean experts should be regarded as infallible, even
within their areas of expertise. They are human, and therefore always capable
of making mistakes. So transparency and dialogue, critical engagement and
debate have a role in providing corrections. But experts are still much more likely to be
right that I am. And maybe experts need a degree of humility too. Perhaps it’s
tempting in the current climate to be a little too dogmatic and emphatic, even
where uncertainties abound. True expertise will always be valuable and should be valued. I wouldn’t take my views on the fate of particle pairs at the edge of black holes too seriously if I were you. We had Stephen Hawking for that.
