I should be happy. Yesterday, my other blog, the boring one about what I do for a living, set a new record for visitors and hits. But I am not happy. Why? Because the recipe for lots of hits is also the recipe for generating more annoyance than a bumblebee buzzing around your gym shorts. Which may not be good for business.

There is a character in the Batman comics, and the recent film, called Two-Face. He is a pretty daft character in some ways, but I can sympathize with his plight. One half wants to do what is right. The other half knows that is a lot of nonsense and just wants. In Freudian terms, the character literally vacillates between indulging the id and being governed by the superego. I think I am like Two-Face, but with the polarity reversed. Two-Face’s id wants to do lots of bad things, like stealing and killing, but the superego wants to do good, like fighting injustice. I think my id wants to do good things, like getting along with people and making friends, and my stupid superego wants lots of terrible and contradictory things, like stopping people doing things I do not like, whilst being democratic about every blasted decision.

I quoted Abraham Lincoln on my other website. How preposterous is that? And not just a one-line quote either. I quoted the Gettysburg Address. The whole thing. I must be insane. I work in some tiny little pissant field that most people think is only about reconciling billing data to ensure it is not mucked up. Yet I quote Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in order to defend my right to poke fun at some other pissant. Geez. Even Barack Obama does not quote the whole Gettysburg Address. In hindsight, it seems like overkill. That is putting it mildly. It is more overkill than squashing an ant with a pneumatic drill.

But I did not start it. They started it. (Hmmm… that argument did not impress even when I was a schoolkid, but in the end it is the best I have got.) They took a line from the Gettysburg Address, which in Lincoln’s original was about government of the people, for the people, by the people. They prostituted it into some cheap marketing line about how their undemocratic hokum marketing vehicle was really a “world” society “for the operators, by the operators” by which they seem to be implying it was run by telecoms operators. So I poked some fun at it, because they only had two members so far. The one that had paid for the website was not an operator, but in fact was a supplier looking to sell its products. With my keen auditing skills undented after all these years, I concluded this was a 50% failure rate on the aforementioned “by the operators” rule. The other member was the company which I work for, in that strangely contorted sense where a company, or even a group of companies, is a legal person and hence the actions of every employee, no matter how silly or self-serving, are somehow the action of that same legal person. So I, duty bound and sticking rigidly to my established modus operandi, had to poke fun at this silly fellow, and hence my own employer.

Since I started working at BT, I got in the habit of making it clear how new I am by telling people how many “working days” I had been there. On Friday I had completed “working day 20″. I am not expecting to make it to working day 22. That is not all that surprising, because I started voicing doubts about new job at around working day 7. Some of my more perceptive peers who have gotten to know me over the years were less optimistic. They were saying I would not last back on working day 2. It seems they know me better than I know myself. In my own take on the Gettysburg Address, I got it into my head that I would rather leave my job than accede to my employer’s request that I do not exercise my freedom of speech. What irks me most is the timing of when they made the request that I remove a certain blog post that made fun of my silly colleague. This silly bugger must have read the post first thing on Friday morning, and he immediately (and rather arrogantly) demanded I rip it down. In two years and over two hundred posts I have never had anyone demand that before, so I replied back saying I would not. Although half the world seems to have called me during the day to discuss what I wrote, my employer’s HR team somehow decided to only instigate damage limitation (as they must see it) at the very end of the working day. I mean, if they were worried about people reading it, why were they so lethargic in doing something about it? Being a Friday, this implies the entry would be missing from the blogosphere for two days at least and probably closer to three, even assuming this storm in a teacup is resolved in my favour very quickly on Monday. If a week is a long time in politics, then three days is an eternity on the blogosphere. I only make halfthoughts posts once a week, but you really need to write at least every other day to sustain a hungry readership. So I did my own Two-Face shuffle, first agreeing to take it off, then deciding to republish and be damned. I guess that means that, come Monday, I will be offering my resignation, mostly because I see no advantage in hanging around a business which is going to ask me to censor myself all the time. All of which means I could be one of those rare employees that finds the majority of their time in a job is spent working out their notice.

The thing with my line of work is that I never set out to annoy people. Years and years ago, I naively tried to do things right. And when I saw that people did things differently to me, I investigated further to find out why there was a difference in approach. After detailed analysis, sometimes to an obsessive extent that bordered on forensic, I reached a regrettable conclusion. I was doing things right, and other people were doing things wrong. However, when I followed the guidance of my id and decided to point this out in an attempt to be helpful, the aforementioned other people took umbrage. They instead concluded that I was wrong and they were right - and reacted in a very forceful and somewhat unpleasant manner. That moment has pretty much defined my career ever since. Because once you start out being in the minority and being chided by the majority, and once you decide to stick to your guns and not back down, it is hard to ever go back. Being right made me enemies and annoyed people, and from that point there never seemed much opportunity to reverse my approach and just go with the flow and do a rubbish job just to fit in and please people. So instead of fighting my fate, and regularly changing tack like Two-Face, I kept on walking down the same road, knowing I was taking a path less trod.

Ever since, I have regularly looked out for fellow travelers at every opportunity. But, of course, we are in the minority. So my business website is my version of a distress signal, signaling to any like-minded stragglers out in the void. At first it was very like a message in a bottle, thrown aimlessly in the internet sea in the hope that it would wash up and be read somewhere, anywhere. Every few days I would lob another missive into the ocean of words. Luckily enough, my bottles did sometimes find dry land. My bottles now find a lot more friendly shores than they used to. Increasingly people lob bottles back. Often those bottles contain supportive messages. Sometimes the bottles are broken and aimed at my head. But, all things considered, I think I would rather take the good with the bad, than cut myself off completely, and have neither.

I do not know what Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, would make of my technique. Clearly, holding a job for 22 days is not a sign of success. But then again, I would probably find Carnegie a difficult man to like. He tried to tell people about the universal techniques for changing people and winning them over to your way of thinking. They may work, but once everybody has learned them, and has fully employed them, how then do you break a stalemate where two people hold contrary points of view? They cannot both just influence a dispute out of existence. I stopped trying to influence people, as the job was just too big for me. Instead, I am happy to search out and find people who already feel the same way as I do. To do that, you have to say something so people can respond, and obviously not everyone is going to respond positively. It will make me friends and make me enemies at the same time. But maybe the moral of the story here is that there is no need to influence and change the people around you, if you can instead find people who already feel like you do. In those circumstances, even my two-faced id and superego might find a way to be reconciled.

If you are like me, you get mildly annoyed when people wander through a museum and feel the need to run their hands all over some ancient sculpture. Chances are they will be ignoring a number of prominent signs saying to keep their grubby hands off. They may also be ignoring the security guards, who will be looking the other way or simply too lazy to intervene. In contrast, if an artist produces a sculpture today, it is as likely as not that touching is not only permitted, but encouraged. Which leads to a quandary: without reading instructions every time we enter a gallery, how can we know the rules for engaging art?

Of course, the really annoying thing about people who put their hands over sculptures is not that they break the rules. The annoying thing is that you respect the rules. You would like to put your own filthy sticky mitts over every great work you see, but you know you are not supposed to. Instead, you allow an invisible convention to erect a force field between your natural inclinations and the object of desire. So whilst you stand there, rendered impotent by your own superego, you are forced to observe others who gleefully take their orders straight from the id.

Some of the problems with the rules for engaging art comes down to inconsistent enforcement. I was in Japan last year, and I was lucky enough to watch a musical performance at a Shinto shrine. There were prominent signs in multiple languages, warning people not to take photos. There was also a guard, presumably paid to wrestle cameras from the meagre throng who would assemble to see the hourly routine. An Italian woman stood boldly at the front of the throng, holding her camera to her chest, with the lens pointed straight ahead. Only a moron would fail to notice her click-de-clicking at regular intervals. The guard did nothing. So, I took it upon myself to do something. My plan was to gently sidle forwards and sideways through the crowd, until I had obstructed her view of the stage. Having accomplished my goal quite easily, I felt satisfied, but only for a moment. The Italian woman reacted in the only selfishly rational way, by moving to a new position further forward, where I could no longer obstruct her view. From there, she resumed her even more obvious and incessant photo taking. At this juncture, the guard waved a finger, vaguely aimed at me, and remarking “no photo”. To which the Italian woman responded by waiting a minute and then resuming her photo taking as if nothing had happened. For the remaining half hour of the performance, the guard had to perform the difficult task of pretending not to notice what the Italian woman was doing. He achieved this by somehow finding the right balance of vague but earnest gazing into the audience whilst never seeing the big woman at the front clearly breaking the rules. Contrast this guard’s approach with that of a fellow I encountered at the Parthenon. Now, perhaps we are not comparing like with like. A fiery Mediterranean defending his country’s history may well be expected to do more than a placid Japanese guy just looking for an easy life. However, you have not heard what I did yet. As a young man, I had some daft and romantic notions. Being at the Parthenon, and away from my then beloved, who was too busy with studies to take a week’s holiday to Greece, it entered my head to take a souvenir to represent my love for her. Now, we are not talking about a Lord Elgin smash and grab here. I was walking along the rubble, and I picked up two small pebbles, one reddish and one bluish. Not whitish marble bits that had once fallen off the Parthenon during the many calamities that had befallen, just common stones that happened to be lying on the same ground as this historic building. I had the idea that my love would have one, and I would keep the other. Yeah, it was a stupid idea all round, but I was lovestruck - an affliction known to impair the capacity to reason. As I was bending down to pick up said pebbles, there was a loud whistle. Then a shouted instruction: “Halt!” Naturally, I froze. An athletic and muscular fellow sprinted at full pelt towards me. For a moment I wondered if he intended to rugby tackle me to the ground, but thankfully he applied the brakes and came to a skidding stop directly in front of me. He loudly demanded that I show him what I had picked up. Seeing the modest pebbles that I meekly held out in my hand, the guard shrugged his shoulders, nodded, and said “fine”. And that was that. Fair play to the Greek guard - rules is rules, and if he had been around a century earlier, Elgin would have left Athens empty-handed.

Why is this in my mind? Well, yesterday my good friend Paul took me to the Psycho Buildings exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. He might as well have been taking me to an interactive workshop designed to explore the rules of what you are allowed to do in a gallery. For example, there was a sculpture by Atelier Bow-Wow called Life Tunnel which the audience were expected to walk through. It was, in short, a metal corridor from one floor of the gallery to another. Prohibitions about touching this would have been silly. Contrast that with the work called Show Room by Los Carpinteros. This depicted a frozen moment in time, during the blowing asunder of a conventional house. The rooms had been hit by some imaginary unseen projectile that had come through one of the walls. All of the objects were hence hung from the ceiling by threads. Some sides of the exhibit were fenced off, indicating that intrusion was not allowed, but others were not fenced off. To what extent was the audience allowed, or even encouraged, to step inside the imaginary walls and see the devastation close up? Touching was presumably not allowed, but only a modest amount of wriggling was necessary to put yourself in a place where you were literally surrounded by the shrapnel of this domestic scene. The more persistent could have relived scenes from Entrapment, Ocean’s Twelve, Ali G Indahouse or Tenacious D and countless other movies where the jewel thief gracefully contorts themselves around the laser beam sensors. Or they could simply have crawled on their bellies and ended up right in the middle of the devastated room, without ever disturbing anything. Either way, you could, in theory, stand well inside the exhibit without ever coming into contact with it, and without having transgressed against any explicit prohibitions. I only took modest steps within the exhibit, not wanting to relive any memories of whistle-blowing guards, but someone more determined - or an eager young child - would probably see it quite differently. And the artists seem to be teasing us too. If you followed the link to Los Carpinteros’ website, you will have seen that they photographed Show Room from the inside, not the outside. All of which rather begs the question of exactly how you are supposed to look at it.

Moving up a floor, we found ourselves in Mike Nelson’s recreation of his To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft. By this, I mean we walked through a door that said “do not touch anything” and entered two large rooms that looked like someone had smashed the walls with a sledgehammer. Given that rubble was strewn across the floor, and inevitably would be stepped upon by many people, it was hard to conceive how the prohibition against touching anything was meant to be interpreted. Perhaps Nelson had intended to procure a zero-g antigravity device so we could float around. Of course, we ignored the stupidly-stated rule, else we would have found myself unable to open the door and ever leave again. Quickly leaving this brazen example of why modern art is rubbish, Paul and I found ourselves immediately re-entering the reality of normal life, stuck at the back of a long queue whilst standing in the rain. However, this particular queue led to Tomas Saraceno’s Observatory. Air-Port City. We queued, and then were asked to participate in a lottery to go either to the top level (and hence enjoy the exhibit as it is really intended) or get the consolation of being allowed inside to the bottom level. Paul and I both lost, and went through the airlock to the ground level of this inflated dome. Our role was to join the crowd sat around and peering up at the lucky three people who were rolling about the transparent membrane suspended ten feet above our heads. They looked down, we looked up. The structure itself, though interesting, was a sideshow. The people inside were the centre of attention. Rolling around on a plastic sheet, in plain view of everyone, was evidently the purpose of this artwork, so a ‘hands off’ rule would have made no sense at all. Indeed, if you lie on your back and stare up at a buxom woman lying face down, arms and legs splayed, and staring right back down at you, you appreciate that this work of art permits an unusually high degree of contact with the surface area of the audience. It also encourages an unusual degree of immodesty. The closest analogy would be those porno films where bikini-clad lovelies manage a carwash and insist on cleaning every windscreen with their D-cups.

Prior to entering Saraceno’s dome, we had been instructed to take our shoes off. With hindsight, this made no sense. Once inside, I put my shoes on the floor like everyone else, meaning the degree of shoe-to-ground contact would have been no different if they had remained on my feet. On leaving the dome, with queueing crowds pressing to get in, nowhere to sit, and the rain still pouring, I decided to get inside first and put on my lace-ups second. What a terrible error. Back in To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, I rested my bag against a big concrete stool so I could bend over and put my shoes on. There was no whistle, but the officious guard was on me like a shot. A long lecture followed about how the concrete stool was part of the exhibit, and hence not to be touched by hand, bag, and certainly not my bum. The fact that the stool looked like an ugly lump of concrete that had been carelessly tossed to one side was irrelevant. That was all part of the artist’s illusion. This illusion would be spoiled and diminished by the merest human contact, never mind - heaven forbid - that a mere amateur like me might actually slightly move anything. One can barely imagine the intricate precision with which Nelson must have bashed those dirty great holes in the plasterboard wall. To an untrained eye, it looked completely random, and the kind of thing any genuine psycho could achieve in just ten minutes of effort, but doubtless Nelson spent many painstaking hours getting the size and shape of each hole just so. So I made my exit, skulking down the similarly concrete stairs and putting my shoes on there. The first step of the stairs represented some kind of imaginary boundary between the artwork and the rest of the world. The artificiality of this dividing line was all too apparent when Paul commented that the concrete stools in the artwork looked exactly like, and probably were, the concrete stools placed around the gallery for people to sit on. It seems a lump of concrete originally intended to be sat upon can becomes an artist’s untouchable creation, so long as you take it from outside the gallery and put it somewhere inside.

The uneven exhibition was saved, at the end, by Rachel Whiteread’s Place. Whiteread is one of those few conceptual artists that actually deserve the description. Her works make the audience think, as well as take wonder. Some of her contemporaries just make you think how they get away with being so talentless. Her village of doll’s houses, each gently lit from inside, presented an eerie and emotional scene. And there was no doubt about the nature of audience interaction. You stood there, and walked around, and looked, and there was no need or confusion about whether to touch. The displays were mounted, making it clear where the thoroughfare of the gallery stopped and the artist’s work began. And it still told you something about the world and how we look at it, irrespective of the traditional nature of the interaction with this compositions - one enjoyed purely by the eye. The artist’s genius had been in collecting and presenting these second-hand playthings. I was lost in Whiteread’s miniature settlement, and could have happily stayed there all night. But then again, I can be a sentimental sort, what with still having that pebble somewhere. Mine was the reddish one. Knowing where art starts can be tricky. But there is no doubt where good art ends. With good art, the end is not found by touching it with our hands. What really matters is that we reach out with hearts and minds.

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking makes for an improbable celebrity. He hardly moves at all, and he tends not to make any noise. If you painted him silver, wheeled him to Covent Garden, and left an upturned hat in front of him, he would steal all the business from those people who pretend to be statues. Everybody associates Hawking with the machines that do the moving and talking for him. He controls the machines, but without them Hawking would be about as entertaining as a log of wood. In fact, without the machines Hawking would be significantly less entertaining than a log of wood, if you decided to stick the log on top of a splendid roaring fire. But that has not stopped Hawking from amassing an impressive list of film and television credits.

Why is Hawking a celebrity? His fame rests on two things. First, he wrote a very successful book designed to explain scientific ideas to a popular audience. Second, he has done some very smart maths about black holes. Nobody can dispute the number of books he has sold. But I can wonder if his cosmological maths is really any better than the cosmological maths being done by other brainy people. I do not not know about you, but my university maths education leaves me underpowered to form my own conclusions about Hawking’s abilities. I have to rely on the say-so of other bods as to whether he really is that clever. Take a look at this revelation that Hawking presented at a conference in 2004, and decide for yourself whether this makes Hawking smarter than the average cosmology professor…

The Euclidean path integral over all topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when analytically continued to the Lorentzian. On the other hand, the path integral over all topologically non-trivial metrics is asymptotically independent of the initial state. Thus the total path integral is unitary and information is not lost in the formation and evaporation of black holes. The way the information gets out seems to be that a true event horizon never forms, just an apparent horizon.

I just about know enough maths to be familiar with the terminology in that statement, but I could not tell you what it means, whether it is true or not, or whether the conclusion could only be reached by a once-in-a-generation genius, or by any diligent Master’s student. I can, however, confidently state one thing about it. It has absolutely no practical use to anyone. Science or not, nobody is better off as a result of knowing this. To categorize it with trivia would be to do trivia a disservice. Knowing the answers to Trivial Pursuits questions like “which whale has a face like a dolphin?” (the beaked whale) and “which is the largest human artery? (aorta) might conceivably come in handy from time to time, and not just for the sake of winning Trivial Pursuits. But knowing that black holes do not form a true event horizon is of no use whatsoever (other than for the sake of winning Trivial Pursuits, if its makers ever include a relevant question).

Hawking has made many appearances as himself in shows that range from the most serious science fact to the very silliest science fiction. Despite that, as actors or narrators go, Hawking is not very good. The factors that make Hawking an ideal competitor at musical statues rather limits his abilities as a performer. This scene from Star Trek allowed Hawking to exhibit his full acting range.

Hawking has also done plenty of comedy over the years, and has even been prepared to do celebrity endorsements. Take a look at this advert.

Hawking the hawker - it is not a part he plays well. The mind boggles at the idea of Stephen Hawking zooming around in outer space in some futuristic spaceship, staring out of the window whilst flogging the centuries-old technology of spectacles. Perhaps Hawking also needs reminding that most of the galactic phenomena which are of interest to the mind also happen to be completely invisible to the eye. They were not kidding when they came up with the name black hole.

Apparently Richard Branson is determined to turn the Specsavers add into reality, by offering to launch Hawking into space. Obviously the deal is a perfect win-win for a celebrity scientist obsessed by space and a ceaseless salesman, who this time is trying to promote his fledgling space tourism business. It is currently unknown if smarty pants Hawking will point out the inconsistency between Branson’s plans to pack the super-rich into tiny tin cans sitting atop huge tanks of rocket fuel and some of his other headline-grabbing initiatives to protect the environment and conserve precious resources for future generations. Probably he will just take his seat on the spaceflight, stare out of the window, and keep schtum.

Hawking’s acting skills cannot win him new admirers. His maths equations are too complicated to understand and too irrelevant to our lives for anyone to care about them. That means Hawking’s major ongoing impact on society comes in the form of his musings on the nature of the universe. For this, he seems to be revered by many. My university education in mathematics may not have been enough to check his sums, but my university philosophy education is more than enough to tell me that when Hawking talks a lot of philosophical codswallop. Take a look at this clip, where he talks around a few ideas from various thinkers.

There are lots of shortcomings in Hawking’s worldview. One of those is that he assumes a positivist framework. Without getting into the detail, positivism ultimately seeks to base all knowledge on sensory experience. Yet Hawking, by virtue of the work he does, must rely on extreme extrapolations from the minute amounts of indirect evidence he has to work with. Theory gets built on theory, built on more theory, built on more theory… and only after a lot more theory do you finally arrive at something that you and I can see or hear. When Hawking talks about event horizons, it is not like he double-checked his results by jumping into a spaceship and going to look at a black hole up close. So what makes Hawking popular - giving answers to questions that have a deep emotional significance for many people - can only be justified on a very tenuous and contingent basis. If Branson ever tried to sign a contract with Hawking, with a view to placing commercial reliance upon Hawking’s theories, the caveats would stretch from this end of the universe to this end of the universe, having completed an orbit of the universe in the meantime.

Hawking also takes liberties with other thinkers, when trying to popularize his ideas and compress other ideas to fit his way of thinking. For example, in the above clip, what Hawking says about Immanuel Kant is wrong. I cannot go into the detail now (it would probably take a 10,000 word thesis to do the topic justice, and I doubt any of you would read to the end) but Kant’s understanding of time was far more subtle than the gross oversimplification presented by Hawking. Kant was a bone fide genius, who changed the intellectual universe in his lifetime and for centuries afterwards. Without Kant, the world would be a very different place. To give a couple of examples, both Marxism and German jurisprudence have an intellectual lineage which can be traced back to Kant. In contrast, it seems unlikely that Hawking’s research will have a lasting impact on the lives of many people. Contrary to what Hawking states, what Kant wrote about time was not just some superficial analysis based on then dominant and mistaken assumptions of physics, but a deep and sophisticated reflection on how we, as humans, comprehend the universe and hence are actively engaged in determining it. Kant’s ideas about time, like his ideas on many other topics, were fresh and revolutionary. In contrast, Hawking’s dismal dismissal of Kant is nothing less than a pop philosophy travesty. But then, you can hardly expect Hawking or anyone else to sum up some of the most intricate and imaginative reasoning of a genius in a couple of slides - just like two Powerpoint slides would not be enough to explain Hawking’s work on black holes.

Maybe Stephen Hawking is a brilliant mathematician, but not that smart or deep a thinker. That does not make him a bad person. Popularizing science is a very good thing for which he deserves a lot of credit. But some of Hawking’s output has turned the noblest of man’s intellectual adventures into lazy popcorn entertainment - to be digested passively without really encouraging thoughtful engagement with the ideas presented. It may leave the audience feeling inspired, but does not challenge them to think. And that should be a damning thing to say about a man of science.

The following clip gives us a lovely insight into Stephen Hawking, and some unexpected evidence about his nature. If comedian Jimmy Carr is telling the truth, it rather suggests Hawking is a very very nice man, but not very smart at all…

The fame of Stephen Hawking appears to be one of those self-perpetuating cycles of celebrity that emerge from time to time, like Jade Goody or Carol Vorderman. A door is opened to new opportunities, and each opportunity leads to another, like a chain reaction. Once the cycle is instigated, there is no proportionate connection between fame and merit. The most recognizable thing about Stephen Hawking is his voice, but it is not his voice at all. It defines Hawking in the imagination, and his pop culture appearances all draw heavily on the distinct tones of his voice simulator, which turns out to be NeoSpeech’s VoiceText product. Quite often we only hear Hawking, and do not see him. He may be narrating, or lending his voice to an animated caricature of himself. After all, unlike actors that run, Hawking is unlikely to do things that are visually stimulating. So when Hawking gets the credit for his voice, why is the credit not going to NeoSpeech instead? They are the ones who really made the sounds, and there will be many times where Hawking is just working from a script written by someone else. Think of the scenario: you give Hawking his lines, and get him to laboriously blink and blink again until he has programmed his machine to recite the words. I presume you record him from his home location, by setting up the microphone where he is, rather than flying him to some recording studio in Hollywood. But given the obsession with CGI simulation in so much modern entertainment, why take the trouble to be authentic and make Hawking do all that blinking and winking that he does to run his computer, when the makers of a show could just as well get their own version of the software and cut out the middle man. In fact, they could save themselves the trouble of paying Hawking too, though they would need to replicate Hawking’s customization of the speed and pitch of the voice.

If there was an innovation, and there was a way to give Hawking back his voice, and make him sound just like Anthony Hopkins or Richard Burton, would Hawking lose some of his fame? Perhaps. We live in a topsy-turvy world where people seek knowledge and inspiration from someone who does obscure mathematics about objects that are incomprehensibly far away. We live in a world constantly changing and expanding because of new ideas, from medical discoveries to computing breakthroughs, yet the poster boy of science is a man who draws the false conclusion that insight into the mathematics of cosmology is the same as insight into the world we experience. It befits Hawking that an enabling technology is both part of his fame, and a reminder that even science has limits.

Wimbledon must rank as the most eccentric of sporting events. Strawberries and cream, Pimms and Lemonade, sporting outfits designed to look like evening wear, part-time champions, Henman Hill being rechristened Murray Mound, Cliff Richard, players moaning about appearing on court no.2, royals handing out prizes, guards of honour made up of ballboys and ballgirls, ten officials for a match made up of two players, the strange way of scoring and umpires talking of love and deuces. It is all a little odd. But the oddest thing is that anyone thinks it can serve as a rallying point in the fight for equality.

A couple of years back, there was a never-ending stream of stories about how unfair it was that Wimbledon gave bigger prizes to men than to women. Even Tony Blair jumped on to Wimbledon equal-pay bandwagon. That Blair had time to speak up for the rights of multimillionaires belies all the recent nonsense from his wife about how he was forced to backstab Brown and hold on to power in order to fight for the things he believed in. In the end, the row was about a difference of UK£30,000 in first prizes worth more than half-a-million pounds. UK£30,000 may be plenty of money to you and me, but I doubt I would lose sleep over it at the end of a day where I had already made twenty times that amount. In the end, The All-England club finally relented, and, as a consequence, the Williams’ sisters will now be slightly richer as a result. But nobody else is better off.

The thing with any business is that, in a free society, we generally seem to like the idea of a meritocracy. That means rewarding people for what they do. Wimbledon is a business, but it is not a meritocracy, at least not when it comes to equal pay for men and women. However much some people love the women’s game, it does not make as much money. Lots of people will argue that women train as hard as men. That may seem an odd argument as the Williams sisters are currently taking time off from their interior design consultancies and fashion houses in order to squeeze in a couple of weeks of bashing the full-time professionals. But how hard women train is irrelevant. Demand determines the price of entertainment, not the effort put in by the entertainers. If training determined how much sports people should make, Paula Radcliffe should earn more than Venus Williams, and Brian Jacks should be as rich as Bill Gates, instead of being someone you may vaguely remember doing lots of squat thrusts on Superstars. Another argument for so-called equal pay is that the women’s game is just as entertaining as the men’s. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I may think chess is more entertaining than tennis, but that would hardly justify taking the money spent on tickets at Wimbledon and giving it as prize money for a chess championship. By the same logic, if the men’s tournament earns more money than the women’s, because more people want to see it, then there is no good reason to take some of those earnings and use it to subsidize the women’s tournament. In the final reckoning, the women’s matches will be watched by fewer people on television, will provide entertainment of shorter total duration, and will generate lower revenues from corporate boxes. Yet the women get paid just as much as the men. Does that seem fair?

Part of the problem with this debate is the way it is framed. If you make an argument about men versus women, then naturally most decent people will say they should be treated equally and leave it at that. The problem is, what is equal treatment? In a normal workplace, women are largely expected to do the same things as men, work the same hours as men, and get measured on the same scale of performance as men. So if they get paid the same, that would seem to be equal. But if women worked shorter hours than men, or their performance was only judged relative to that of other women, and not to all their co-workers, equal payment is unfair. It would be just as unfair as paying a man the same wage as a woman but expecting him to work less.

One sport that has a different, but arguably very fair way of paying its protagonists is boxing. Boxing, unlike tennis, is a sport full of divisions to ensure fairness. Big guys beating up little guys would be boring, silly and dangerous by equal measures, so there are lots of weight divisions in boxing. But irrespective of the divisions, pay is determined by popularity. Popular boxers draw bigger crowds and more television viewers than less popular boxers, so they get more money. Winning is one way to be popular, but nobody tries to turn the equation on its head and argue that winning is the same as being popular. So why not do the same with tennis? Why not pay more to popular tennis players and less to the less popular tennis players? That would be fair - and would make no distinction based on gender. Part of the problem is that, during a tournament, there would be insufficient lead time to promote individual match-ups, thus making it hard to determine who was really drawing in the crowds. But with the rise of pay-television, maybe we will have the solution in a few years’ time. Because if people pay to watch individual matches, you will soon be able to tell who generates the money, and who does not. And you could also start to price the matches accordingly. People who like the idea of rewards based on merit may feel that such a system is inherently unfair, as it gives all the money based on popularity rather than skill and talent. But doing anything else is a form of market distortion - moving money from who generates it to somebody else who does not generate it. If women generate more money than men, they deserve more. As it happens, they generally do not generate as much money as men, which is why the arguments about equality between men and women in terms of prize money are misguided and miss the point. Affirmative action makes sense if a group is repressed and cannot get the same opportunities. Affirmative action for millionaire tennis players is just daft. Linking the money squabbles of spoilt tennis stars to the struggle to guarantee fair treatment for women in the wider work force is not just wrong-headed, it should be considered offensive.

Of course, the female players know perfectly well how money works in the real world. For the top players, prize money comprises only a small share of their incomes. The Williams’ sisters may talk big about fairness, but you will not hear them complaining how being American gives them access to more lucrative sponsorship and marketing deals than could be realized by players from poorer countries. By the same token, few women players seem to complain about the extraordinary amounts they are paid for wearing fashionable clothing, both on and off court. You can guarantee that many men, women and children spend long days in sweatshops, earning a pittance whilst serving the same business empires that ultimately will lavish riches on these tennis clothes-horses (or should that be clothes-whores?) Very occasionally you may find that a less pretty player will have a moan about how the Anna Kournikovas of the world are paid based on looks, not tennis talent. However, they do not moan for long, because everyone knows that, unlike complaining about prize money, there is no point arguing for equal treatment in the face of unequal beauty. Players get paid to sell, and that makes beauty a valuable asset. So the Williams sisters will also wear their off-the-shoulder outfits and grace the covers of magazines (take a look at Serena Williams’ official website) in order to make some easy money, without any sense of guilt. Whilst the outspoken sisters talk about being smarter, better, more balanced than every other tennis player on the circuit, and are very keen to insist on equal treatment whenever they feel disadvantaged, they say nothing about the real disparities in this world. They have no intention of hurting their wallets on a matter of principle. For all their talk, the sisters will not be giving lectures about how their glamourous photo-shoots have nothing to do with talent, help to push unrealistic expectations for average women, or how they promote a sexist ideal of feminine virtues. They have even more reason to stay mute when you remember this insidious form of sexism - that a woman’s value is determined by how attractive she looks - not only exploits women but is promulgated by women for the purpose of profiting from other women.

Equality makes for nice headlines, so long as you keep the arguments simple. Make the argument about men versus women, and the rabble-rousing is bound to be successful. But what about equal prize money for short people, or for older players? If Indians hardly ever win Wimbledon, should there be a separate competition for players from that sub-continent, with equal prize money, just to avoid any prejudice against them? How about a tournament just for people who were born into poor families and had to make more sacrifices in order to play tennis? And what about equal treatment for disabled players? Wimbledon also plays host to a small doubles contest for players in wheelchairs. By the logic of equality used to justify equal pay for women, there should be equal contests and equal pay for every category of player and contest. That would mean proper singles contests for wheelchair players, that those matches should get equal exposure, that they will be played on the same show courts, and that the winners should take an equally large prize. Of course, in the real world, fewer people would want to watch those matches, which is why they the wheelchair players do not get the same size of prize. If you imposed equality, by taking the current pot of prize money, and splitting it so the wheelchair players got an equal share, you would soon see how many top players really care about equality.

There is one very straightforward way to ensure absolute equality for all players, based purely on merit whilst eliminating any prejudices based on sex. That would be by removing any divisions within the sporting contest, and having everyone competing for the same prize. Men would play women on an equal basis, whether over five sets or three. We are nearly there already. Unlike boxing, with its many divisions, all that would be needed at Wimbledon would be for the unification of the men’s and women’s contests. That would be true equality of treatment, in every possible sense. Gender would be rendered irrelevant, and we could appreciate people purely based on how well they play, and not for their sex. Of course, women may find themselves losing to men more often than not. Not surprisingly, that is the kind of equality that the current crop of super-rich stars of the women’s game are happy to do without.