"The uncomfortable but unavoidable truth is that Hawking’s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability. I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that."
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@phillycodehound @sohkamyung You know those "Everyone in Hollywood knows" stories? Everyone in physics knew. Even science-adjacent me knew he was abusive to his wife, remote from his family, and terrible to his collaborators.
The things in this article were pretty well known in both the physics community and in Cambridge. And they weren't new. My father met Hawking as a student and talked about his hobby of trying to get engineering students to say something incorrect about physics and then mercilessly mocking them in front of his acolytes.
@david_chisnall wow such a nice guy. Ugh
In contrast, I worked a couple of doors down from Sir Tony Hoare (Turing Award winner) and he was a genuinely kind and supportive person.
The first time I met him, I was on a panel with him. PPIG invited the two of us as people outside their community to give other perspectives. Being the one of two who didn't have a Turing award and a knighthood. Tony was amazing and really made me feel like a peer, rather than a (very) junior colleague. I was a lot more confident about being on the panel with him after a five minute chat beforehand.
When I later worked near him, he was always happy to chat and bounce ideas around.
I only met Peter Higgs briefly (he got an honorary professorship at the same time I got my PhD, I was two up on stage behind him) and he seemed a similarly decent person. His entire acceptance speech was about how the thing he got his Nobel Prize for (symmetry breaking) was something that a load of other people were working on at a similar time and he was lucky to get there first.
@sohkamyung Good grief. I guess no one is an angel. But seriously.