Stephen Hawking and Interpretation

Stephen Hawking came to Hong Kong last week, and gave one keynote speech at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). As expected, it created lots of hype surrounding his work, his disease, to a point that all of a sudden, everyone – not just U-students, but politicians, some bankers, housewife and their kids – tries to get a hold of the tickets to one of his talks. They even made some laser-tech based tickets at HKUST just to avoid the fakes trying to get in – have you ever heard of seeing fake admission tickets at the door of an academic lecture???

I will not talk about the interpretation of Stephen Hawking’s work, cause I never really read his work (I guess the most famous one being A brief history of time) and tons of other people can do a better job. But I got to say something about how Hawking himself is interpreted in this amazing city Hong Kong, in which everything can be broken down to one thing -- entertainment.

As most people know, Stephen Hawking is diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disorder with severe retardation of body movements that is eventually fatal. I feel sorry for the man himself, not just because of the disease, but because sometimes he is better known for his disease than for his work. I ain’t saying his work is not famous, because it takes a lot of knowledge (and guts) to come up with something like “the Big Bang” and claim that you have explained to the world what Einstein could not explain in his work. But in Hong Kong (I don’t want to generalize and expand this to other societies/cultures), the hype has it that “oh man, he is the dude with this muscular atrophy thing, and he is physicist with awesome ideas!”, instead of “oh man, he is the scientist who has developed this awesome theory!”. And the reason I say this is not because I think so – some U-students came out of the talk, and I am quoting what I read in the newspaper, “Oh man, the vocal synthesizer he controls with his eyeball was so cool…” as if he went in just to check out his wheelchair; or some woman said “I can now die fulfilled and without regret” because she said goodbye to Hawking at the airport.

The truth is, if Stephen Hawking were not an ALS patient, he could have come to Hong Kong with whatever evidence or even proof for Big Bang theory, and still would not have created the kind of hype that he did. Hong Kong is a city that does not value science, not because we don’t think science is important – we somehow do when it comes to stocks for the biotech corps – but most people don’t give a crap. And I will give you one example to support this: when it comes to laws that involve biotechnology and bioethics, the laws that are supposed to govern experiments, say like, stem cells and fetal germ cells, are at least 15 years (possibly more) behind the technology itself. Why? Because it had never even appeared to the lawmakers that we should set our ethical grounds on these, though it is talked about all over the (developed) world – which is why no matter how “developed” Hong Kong is in the economic sense, it’s never really truly developed. After all, there are not that many research based biotech companies in Hong Kong; academic research is going on among Universities, especially on genomics, but still we are focusing just on the fame that it would bring us as the “Asia’s World City” (by this “we” I ain’t referring to the researchers and the teachers I respect, but people like the vice chancellor, or whoever sitting in the board…etc.), but not the possible implications of the scientific work we are doing in Hong Kong. Because this is the bottom line: as science moves forward, so are our values; when we can’t defend our values, we lose the grounds, the justification, for doing science – because then, if what you create requires destruction of the meanings and values of life in the process, it doesn’t really matter how many lives on earth can be saved by your new biotech invention, cause you have already killed life.

In fact, after studying biology and had a glimpse of what cell bio research is like, I realize that biotech and biopolitics make the perfect new couple – Foucault talked about medicalization, with implications that are still true, but Biotech is pushing these limits of biopolitics everyday at a pace we can’t even keep up with (or to view it a little differently, closing the gap between life and sovereign to a point that has never been so intimate before).

Coming back to Hawking: in Hong Kong, he is interpreted as the physicist with that severe disease. It is indeed, very respectable: his courage, his perseverance, the inspiration he gives to the next generation. But my point is: you don’t necessarily have to look at a diseased physicist to get these virtues, ‘cause if you do, you are disrespecting both Stephen Hawking himself, for interpreting him not with his work but his defect, and all other physicists, whose hard work are then not acknowledged equally even though they might have been important in the same field or the other.

This is what I mean by interpretation: sometimes we look at someone, or something, without addressing the real value that it has or deserves, but to go the opposite – we devalue that something, strip it to the last reducible form where we add new values and meanings to it as we please. I can’t say interpretation is wrong, for everyone single one of us interpret various things everyday; in fact, in a truly democratic society, everyone should co-exist peacefully regardless of how different their interpretations might be. But when a group of people in the same environment tends to interpret homogeneously without criticizing the basis for that interpretation, something is wrong. As we see now in Hong Kong, everything is about giving an interpretation that would give you the highest degree of entertainment – entertainment in the sense it would give a common, hot topic of interest as a social happening, the hype: from the Bus Uncle clip that “captures” every bit of our curious slim shady, to both the disease and work of Stephen Hawking, they have all served the same purpose in this tiny Asia City – a city so full of herself that she has forgotten she doesn’t form a dot on the world atlas.

This type of interpretation, is seen as the new form of news in Hong Kong that I call Entertainmentization, a phenomenon that I have hated (and bashed, in my high school composition class) every since I was 16, and it has been going downhill from there.

Wha’mo’can I say?