Stephen Hawking 1942 - 2018

read an article today that said great medical care can improve and lengthen the lives of many all patients, but he did have a very rare slow growing form.
also, he was almost gone from pneumonia, and the docs told his wife to pull the plug. she said no, and they doubled down on the care and succeeded.

 

My wife used to work for Hong Kong's main English-language newspaper - that was why we met when I lived there. This was in the early 2000s.

One day, the magazine section was running a profile piece on Stephen Hawking, and the woman next to her was sub-editing the piece. Charlotte was known not to be a genius and to have got her job through family connections.

Charlotte said to my wife, "This writer is an idiot. He's said Stephen Hawking is British! Everyone knows he's American. How can he be so stupid?"

My wife said, "Yes, he is British. That's not a mistake."

Charlotte said, "Don't be an idiot. I've seen him on TV. He's got an American accent."

 

well, there you go.

 

I owe your wife a dozen roses!

Bob Wilson

 

There certainly was a lot to admire about Stephen Hawking and the life he lived.

Maybe what I admired the most was his seemingly undefeatable sense of humor.
Whether he was attempting to explain something complicated, or simple, what he primarily advanced was a humble invitation to think about things.
He will be missed.

 

I did actually very briefly meet him once. In the early 90s, I lived in Cambridge, as did he. At the time, he was still able to control his electric wheelchair by himself. I was with a few friends, coming up the slope from The Mill (a pub)* to the Anchor (another pub)** after a day of drunken punting***. He was on the slope ahead of us, and crashed into a wall. My friends and I checked he was OK - he was - and we went our separate ways.



* I was a student.
** I was a student.
*** I was a student.

 

No one else has lived a life like Prof. Hawking's. This outness, differentness and bigness entirely falls upon us, his survivors, to narrate exceptional things he did.

Prof. Hawking took a shot at communicating hard concepts of high-level physics to folks in general. For him and others so inclined, it will always be a challenge.

For me, the essence of 'knowing' things way out there is to think of stars as grains of sand (rescaled) that are kilometers apart at least. With such rescaling, our galaxy spans thousands of kilometers.

Within which there are vast numbers of stars; many of which may harbor planets in the water range (which we think is bio-important). Biology is either (rather magically) a just-Earth thing, or it is effing everywhere. We don't know. It seems quite hard to know because spatial separations are so vast and our ability (so far) to go out is only done at small scales.

ET (and I assume they do exist) may very well have solved the problem of crossing vast distances. This does not imply that they'd come to Earth in particular. Nor that they'd choose to reveal themselves here. From our side it remains speculation.

==
Prof. Hawking suggested that ET (if they turned their attention towards Earth) might bring harm. That could not be dismissed, and yet, if we view biological planets as rare and very far apart, things might be otherwise.

If ET aspired to harvest elements far down the table of elements, I guess that there are many sources, other than planets with biologicals that would get all hot headed and respond with chemical and nuclear explosions. Why go to all that trouble?

If ET aspired to 'understand' biologicals, why would they probe butts and similar? Here on Earth we've already figured out that DNA is the thing. Just take some hair or skin or blood and off you go.

Might ET aspire to prevent People of Earth from going all Outer-Space-Miitaristic? To me this seems the faintest hypothesis of all. We here do 'military' on 1000's km scales. At much larger scales, we got nothing.

==
Prof. Hawking will be remembered for expressing caution against 'announcing' ourselves to ET. I see this differently with us announcing that we are mostly harmless and not all that interesting.

 

There is speculation that having interesting mental problems to solve may explain his ALS survival. I’m hoping his sense of humor and socialized medical care played a part.

 

Chaos theory at it's working best!

His synthesised monologues and conversions had to be laboriously compiled by him and edited well in advance of broadcast time. Otherwise it would have come across as jerky with many pauses and perhaps, a few errors also. His method made it all more understandable and easier to listen to. Genius in so many ways. RIP.

 

Yes, but did he actually do that for when he appeared on the Simpsons, Futurama, Dilbert, etc, did he just the show the ok to use his 'voice'?

 

I really don't know. Can't remember whether that was mentioned in the BBC interview program, but I'd like to think we as fastidious as usual.

 

Oh boy! That should have read 'monologues and conversations.'

 

Edit:. .. But I'd like to think he was as fastidious as usual. Sorry folks. My fault for using a stupid tablet and a very fickle finger!

 

you're talking to yourself again.

 

Serious matter at hand is whether Hawking family will reduce Super-Steve to powder, and it any of that powder gets sent out to space. No thoughts of the deceased have been revealed.

 

From Wikipedia:


Stephen Hawking in popular culture - Wikipedia

 

no benny hill appearance?

 

Y'all may know that JFK had a speech prepared for some event in Texas, that he did not deliver because of being shot. It has been 'crafted' with words and intonation. Digital technology is quite a thing.

Hawking could more easily speak post-mortem because he stayed with decades-old speech software, because, why not? Click-bait websites could easily make it appear that SH said, well, anything. We'd do better to avoid such..

 

The heaviest recent stuff was what Hawking was saying about the time before big bang. He basically said there was no "time" as we know it ....before big bang, time did not exist.

 

No known physics provides any insight prior to that whoomph we call Big Bang. While cosmologists might wonder, I can't see them lifting the veil. It is like the biggest veil that ever could be.