Outside Time: Hawking March 14, 2018
No obit this,
But chance to memorize, memorialize,
Tattoo the size of genius,
How it comes to earth in time
Then goes god-only-knows how/where –
Knowing only: not damned here.
Yet ‘there’, by definition place,
Perhaps is space;
Maybe a ‘where somewhere’ in space -
A guess both uniformed and obvious.
Mister Hawking, master Hawking
Freed from chair and ALS,
Cells and intellect’s fine processes;
Mammoth efforts of all kinds
To feed the body,
Read the mind(s)
Of universes.
To record this day inordinately mixed
With sadness, pride, heroics -
That a man second to none
Has been an Einstein all his own;
Whose works we’ll clone (to yet go farther)
For ‘by works you shall be known.’
God blessed the non-believer Hawking.
Stephen Hawking -- John Paul Blanchette
Stephen Hawking -- John Paul Blanchette
Thank you dear publisher for correcting the spelling of Hawking - for a king he was!
ReplyDeleteStephen Hawking became one of the 20th century's best known scientists despite suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a sickness that causes the death of neurons controlling voluntary muscles, leading to the inability to speak, swallow, and breath (often called "Lou Gehrig's disease" because it was the same ailment that ended the career of the faous New York 1st baseman, "the Iron Horse," who died from it a few months before Hawking was born). As a student at University College, Oxford, he was an indifferent student, and he needed to score a 1st-class honours degree to pursue graduate study in cosmology; since he was on the borderline between 1st- and 2nd- class honours he had to take an oral examination, at which he was asked about his plans -- "If you award me a First," he replied, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford. I expect you will give me a First." He entered Trinity Hall in Cambridge in 1962. In 1968 he and Roger Penrose developed a proof that the universe began as a singularity (where matter is compressed to a point in a black hole) and in 1970 he postulated the "2nd law of black hole dynamics." In 1974 he showed that black holes emit radiation (known as Hawking radiation) and continued to advance revolutionary concepts in physics, either alone or in collaboration with Penrose and others. In 1988 he achieved popular acclaim with the publication of "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes," which went on to sell over 10 million copies and which Steven Spielberg made into a movie in 1992. As a graduate student he married Jane Wilde, but they divorced in 1995; after his 2nd marriage failed in 2006 the Hawkings resumed a close relationship, and Jane wrote a memoir "Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen," which became the basis for "The Theory of Everything" which was nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Eddie Redmayne won in the Best Actor category) as well as top honors from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. From 1986 he relied on the "Equalizer" computer program developed by Words Plus CEO Walter Woltosz to communicate; it scanned a bank of some 3,000 words and letters which Hawking selected on a computer; by 2005 he had to control the device with movements of his cheek muscles, and then relied on an adaptive word predictor made by the London-based SwiftKey which used his earlier writings and similar materials to formulate his expressions.
ReplyDeleteThe foundations of Hawkings' theoretical work were developed early in the 20th century by Albert Einstein. He grew up in München but moved to Zürich at 16 to attend an eidgenössische polytechnische Schule (federal polytechnic school) which eventually became the renowned Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, though the school did not begin its transformation into a university until after Einstein left. At 12 he had taught himself algebra and geometry and derived an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem (the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides of a triangle)and by 14 had mastered calculus. After graduation he tried unsuccessfully to find a teaching post and finally settled for a job as an assistant patent examiner in Bern but was passed over for promotions until he fully mastered marine technology. While there in 1906 he published 4 groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (an amount of energy has the same amount of mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, E=mc2) and obtained his PhD, leading to professorships at the Universität Bern, the Karls-Universität in Praha, and the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften in Berlin. Based on his new theory of general relativity in 1911 he calculated that light from another star should be bent by the sun's gravity, a prediction that was confirmed during a 1919 solar eclipse, making Einstein world famous. ("The Times" headline for 7 November 1919: "Revolution in Science – New Theory of the Universe – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown"). However, his theory of general relativity (published in 1915) was still controversial, and his 1921 Nobel Prize was awarded "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect" (which was a pivotal step in the evolution of quantum mechanics). Thus he was central to the development of both of the pillars of modern physics, although he quickly became disenchanted with the implications posed by quantum theory and continued to disprove it until he died in the US in 1955. He spent much of his later decades trying to generalize his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism as another aspect of a single entity, what he called a "unified field theory" in 1950. In 1926, Einstein and his former student Leó Szilárd co-invented an absorption refrigerator that had no moving parts and used only heat as an input; in 1939 Szilárd wrote a letter (signed by Einstein) to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt warning about the potential development of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type" which Szilárd had been working on before he fled to the US and recommending that the US begin similar research to counter Adolph Hitler's weapons -- the letter inspired the American development of the atomic bomb. Over the course of a 1/2 century Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and over 150 non-scientific works.
ReplyDelete"If we do discover a complete theory of the universe, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that we and the universe exist."
ReplyDelete-- Stephen Hawking