RIP Stephen Hawking

Aw man. Bummer. :(

Sad news. Our world is a bit dimmer today.

Science is in such bad shape in the US and I suspect the UK and the rest of the West today. Losing him just makes it that much harder.

Brilliant man, and one of the best faces of science we had. That a wheelchair bound physicist with ALS could be so impactful that your average American knows of him is a testament to his brilliance. He will be missed.

It’s also fitting that it’s Einstein’s birthday.

This was the moment I became familiar with Hawking. I remember asking my brother who he was, and I thought he was an old man at the time, but I guess considering that was in 1993 or so, I guess he wasn’t that old. 17 year old me probably thought anyone over 50 was old.

He’ll be missed. A Brief History of Time is one of my favorites.

I think that’s how i was. When i first discovered him in book form 25 or so years ago it seemed he wasn’t long for this world; he was already 50ish and in apparently such bad health. And yet… he not only kept going but became a fixture of popular culture. To the point I took him for granted and forgot about his mortality.

I can’t say he’s inspiring in a normal sense, because both the suffering of his condition, his ability to reach beyond that condition, and his achievements are so beyond my capabilities all I can do is gawk stupidly. Rather he’s inspiring in a more general sense, at the achievement of human greatness so perfectly intertwined with human frailty.

So much of modern astrophysics and even sci-fi understandings of popular culture derive from him. When he first came onto the notice of the public in the 70s, we still thought (not the scientific community, but the public) black holes were literally holes. His efforts to educate the broader public took decades to percolate through society, but paid great dividends. In the end scientists were grappling even just a year or two ago with new ideas like “firewalls” and the information of the black hole being contained in the event horizon with the quantum mechanism of his long predicted black hole evaporation being the underpinning concept. It’s now just accepted every galaxy has a supermassive black hole at its center. And he was a belated but unusually poignant voice warning us about possible future human-scale disasters that we should turn our attentions toward. I think the latter weren’t and aren’t taken seriously enough, just a dottering old physicist and not Stephen Hawking said worry about AI or human level extinction events.

Errol Morris filmed a documentary on Hawking in the early 90s. I remembered watching is a kid but it took me years to track it down online (apparently it’s newly available from Criterion, and rightly so).

Unlike other Hawking documentaries, it focuses on his early life, particularly pre-ALS before delving into his relationships with his family.

I thoroughly recommend it for a better idea of the person behind the ‘man’

https://twitter.com/RobMSantos/status/973799953003933698

He did a lot with all that extra time.

The world just got a whole lot fucking stupider, which is the last goddamn thing we needed.

Just watch the Futurama episode where they get in a time machine and have to loop around to the heat death of the universe a few times and see it reborn. Time is circular, he thought.

Rip Steven Hawking.

A Brief History of Time is wonderful, but my favorite science book of all time is The Demon Haunted World by Sagan. Such a powerful book and it will cure you of any lingering mysticism.

The first summer out of college, I read Brief History of Time and Demon-Haunted World. They both rekindled a love of science that had been set aside by four years of liberal arts.

His writings contributed to my sense of awe at the universe. And in terms of playing a bad hand into a winner, his life is one of the all-time greats.

The FSM was all like, “I gave ALS to who now?”

/backtracking intensifies

The great man has passed. The universe mourns.

I loved a Demon Haunted World. I figured that was because Carl was just a lot smarter than me, while Hawking was in a whole other league of brilliance.

Morris’s documentary has one really funny standout moment for me. One of Hawking’s students relates a story about visiting a cottage with a steep path. Hawking in his motorised wheelchair ends up tipping over. The student found it hilarious that the master of time and space was defeated by the weak force of gravity.