I wrote:
I wrote:
It shows the limits on how much he actually cared about educating the public.

And here is a video that shows the limits of how much Stephen Hawking cared about educating his own daughter:

'My Father, Stephen Hawking' (World Science Festival, June 14, 2009)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVVR4QyiqMc&t=5m16s

Quote:
"HERE HE IS FLOATING IN ZERO GRAVITY." -Lucy Hawking

She's speaking to this photo of her father Stephen Hawking on the Zero-G airplane flight:
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RVVR4QyiqMc/maxresdefault.jpg


This leaves three possible explanations:
- Stephen Hawking himself had a deficient understanding of gravity,
- Stephen Hawking did not care enough to teach his own daughter very basic info about what gravity is and what gravity isn't, or
- Lucy Hawking DOES know that zero-g is not "zero gravity", but that she does not care about using accurate terminology.


This video of Hawking's daughter, taken together with that video title posted on his website, leads me to lean toward the middle conclusion.

Hawking died with a reputation for being a great educator. But these two videos stand as stark examples of his limits in caring about educating people on accurate physics.
snip

This situation is worse than I had originally thought. Up to now, I had given Stephen Hawking benefit of doubt. But here is a direct quote from his own book:

My Brief History (2013)
https://books.google.com/books?id=zU0TAAAAQBAJ&pg=PA125

Quote:
"I have been under the sea in a submarine and up in a hot air balloon and a zer-gravity flight, and I'm booked to go into space with Virgin Galactic."


This new info gives rise to these three possibilities:
- Hawking was lacking in the most basic understanding of what gravity isn't, or
- Hawking did not care about using scientifically accurate terminology, or
- Hawking had a ghost writer write his books, while he himself did not bother to proofread them in any thorough way.


It should also be noted in the earlier criticism of his daughter Lucy's statement that she had co-authored a series of books with him, and that these books covered the science of gravity. Yet she used this scientifically bogus term. And here is yet another example of a publication with Hawking's name on it that uses this bogus terminology.

Given this new set of three possibilities, if Hawking is to still be given the benefit of doubt, then the third explanation would be leaned toward.

....and this would mean that he was sloppy and lazy, instead of ignorant about this basic physics concept that even undergraduates should have a total grasp of.

Given any of those three explanations, this one quote from his book certainly impacts his legacy as an educator. Perhaps someone who was close to him might be able to provide more info that might shed some light on this grossly negligent (or grossly incompetent) finding.

There are now TWO INSTANCES of him being directly associated with these uses of the bogus term "zero gravity". And that's on top of no indication of him voicing objection to his daughter's use of the term. Given these finds with the very little effort that I've put into looking, it would not be surprising if there were plenty of other examples out there.

Given these several data points, I expect there will be many who will hold to a position that "It doesn't matter."

What that does is expose one's own ignorance in the importance of this issue.

An analogy that's been offered here many years back is that of standing in a river. You feel the current of water flowing around you. It is a visceral experience. Now imagine the person standing in the stream picking up their legs and floating down the river. This person makes the claim:

"I am now completely dry. Watch me float downstream. I am experiencing Zero Wetness."

Such a person is utterly clueless about the very basic conceptual understanding of what soaking in water is and what it isn't. You don't become dry just because you picked your feet up and the current is no longer opposing your standing position. You never left the "field" of water, and its wetness never approached anywhere close to zero.

Here we have at least three examples of Stephen Hawking and his offspring making statements that indicate their view that they were "completely dry" while fully soaking in the Earth's gravitational field.

ABSOLUTELY ASTOUNDING.

I am now going to have to rethink that proposal I had posted over at s.s.policy about renaming the new Space Telescope after him. Gravity, in 2018, is still a huge mystery. But there are many things that we are absolutely clear that it is not. This telescope holds the promise of unlocking many of gravity's mysteries. And it now seems questionable to name it after a person who has this embarrassingly loose terminology so intricately associated with his name.

~ CT