Commentary: Stephen Hawking taught us it was right to be wrong

In 2002, the future Nobel Prize winner Peter Higgs joined several fellow physicists at a dinner in Edinburgh, Scotland. Drinks flowed, and professional invective followed. The physicists were frustrated by, and perhaps a little jealous of, Stephen Hawking, the newspaper The Scotsman reported the next morning.“It is very difficult to engage [Hawking] in discussion, and so he has got away with pronouncements in a way that other people would not,” Higgs is quoted as saying. “His c