Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant men on the planet. His work involving black holes is amazing and widely recognized. He is especially amazing, because he has carried on so well in the face of his motor neurone disease, ALS. He still does a large amount of work for anyone, much less for someone who is nearly completely paralyzed. I've pasted a paragraph from his biography below. You can read the whole thing here.
Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.
Monday night, right here in Pasadena, Stephen Hawking gave a public presentation. Caltech is here in Pasadena and he comes for a month once a year to do some work with professors here. Amazing! I had no idea! Aaron and I and a couple of friends went to hear him speak. Well, listen to his prerecorded synthesized computer tell us his thoughts. It was cool! And a bit humorous. It was in a large auditorium and they had him enter from the back. They spotlighted the back door to the accompaniment of the theme to 2001: A Space Odessey! Hillarious! And very fitting. He slowly made his way to the front, (I was on an aisle seat and could have reached out to touch him, but that would have been creepy. Not to mention I probably would have his two VERY burly bodyguards tackle me :P )
The topic of Prof. Hawking's speech was, "Why We Should Go Into Space." He made several excellent arguments about why we should look outward rather than inward to help solve global problems. He gave the example of the space race in the 1960's, of how things developed in the space program spread and now have an effect on our everyday lives. Integrated circuit chips (you know, the things that make our computers work so well), velcro, Tang, etc. I really enjoyed the experience and I was glad to go to an open public presentation. I'm not sure I would have understood anything he would talk about at a classroom level :P
1 comment:
Very cool! I read his biography a couple years ago. That is awesome that you got to see him in person.
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