From Brian Gallagher at Nautilus:
But perhaps the peak of admiration for Hitchens flows from those who most identify with the two following qualities: a reverence for science and philosophy, and a conviction that both should be the basis of personal belief and ethics in society.
Take Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at Arizona State University, and the author of the 2012 book A Universe from Nothing: Why There’s Something Rather Than Nothing, who confessed to being stunned and grateful to have been Hitchens’ friend. At the writer’s Washington, D.C. apartment, Krauss once winkingly said to a visitor, who asked whether Krauss was Hitchen’s agent, that he was his “personal physicist.” Krauss has said that Hitchens motivated him to have a more public voice: “I remember on the day he died I told myself, ‘To whatever small extent I could emulate any of those qualities, in my own work—to keep the candle of joy and wonder and irony that he kept burning—I dedicate my life to that task.” (You can hear Hitchens’ voice in a recent New Yorker article by Krauss on why an atheist should replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court.) Krauss is as a good a representative of this scientific-minded, secularist group as any.
Yesterday, he tweeted: “Dec 15 here in London. Been 5 years since we lost a remarkable man & I lost a friend: Christopher Hitchens. I miss him. We can’t forget him.” (Krauss wasn’t the only scientist to express this. The neuroscientist Sam Harris wrote a blog post titled, “Missing Hitch,” and the evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne also wrote, in his blog post, … More.
The fact that the article opens with this particular constellation of “greats who still care” makes sense. Hitchens was, after all, one of the Four Horsemen of the new atheist Apocalypse.
That also points to Hitchens’ legacy. In death, he did not attract different correlations or admirers so his legacy will stand or fall on their fortunes.
See also: Larry Krauss goes after new US Education Secretary Betsy DeVos: Really, the vast underperformance of publicly-funded US school systems, relative to those of other technologically advanced nations, should be the only issue on the table down there just now, not DeVos’s private opinions.
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