Stephen Hawking @70

[Rob McCow]

Just wanted to share this piece from The Independent:

He was there in spirit, but sadly not in person. Stephen Hawking missed his own 70th birthday party yesterday at Cambridge University on doctor's advice – he was recovering at home from an infection that had put him in hospital for a few days last week.

The world's most famous living scientist, who was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the age of 21 and given just two years to live, nevertheless used a pre-recorded speech to deliver his birthday lecture.

The packed auditorium included the Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees, Professor Saul Perlmutter, the Nobel Prize winner in physics last year, the businessman Sir Richard Branson and the model and former Cambridge arts student Lily Cole.

In a highly personal talk, Hawking spoke movingly of the role his father played in picking him up from the devastating diagnosis when he was just beginning his PhD at Cambridge University – and how his doctor dropped him as a hopeless case and then never saw him again.

"My mother realised something was wrong and took me to the doctor," Hawking said. "I spent weeks in Bart's Hospital [in London] and had many tests. They never actually told me what was wrong, but I guessed enough to know it was pretty bad, so I didn't want to ask.

"In fact, the doctor who diagnosed me washed his hands of me, and I never saw him again. He felt that there was nothing that could be done. In effect, my father became my doctor and it was to him that I turned for advice."

His father, a researcher in tropical diseases at the Medical Research Council in Mill Hill, initially opposed Hawking's early interest in mathematics and wanted his son to pursue instead a career in medicine.

The title of Hawking's talk, "A Brief History of Mine", was a deliberate play on the title of his first popular science book, A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 10 million copies worldwide since it was published in 1988.

His friend and fellow cosmologist Kip Thorne joked yesterday during his own talk on the golden age of black holes that he measures the sales of his own popular science books in "milli-Hawkings".

Hawking said he decided to write a popular science book to pay for his rising care costs and the fees of his children's schools, although the main reason was because he enjoyed it, he said.

"I never expected A Brief History of Time to do as well as it did. Not everyone may have finished it or understood everything they read. But they at least got the idea that we live in a universe governed by rational laws that we can discover and understand," he said.

His talk yesterday began with his birth on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, took in his early childhood in London, when he had a passionate interest in model trains (he even dreamt of electric trains), and ended with his current interests in the existence of many different universes, encapsulated in a revolutionary idea known as M-theory.

"M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing. These multiple universes can arise naturally from physical law," he said.

"Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states at later times, that is, at times like the present, long after creation.

"Most of these states will be quite unlike the universe we observe and quite unsuitable for the existence of any form of life.

"Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Thus our presence selects out from this vast array only those universes that are compatible with our existence.

"Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense lords of creation," Hawking concluded.

I've got no idea whether Stephen Hawking is the greatest genius of our time; I don't know enough about physics. However, there is much to celebrate about his life and the sheer amount he has done to help popularise science.

[Si Hunt]

It always amazes me that the world could have birthed a genius like Hawking in the Stone age, for example, and he would just have been wasted living in caves and clubbing Wooly Mammoth's to death.

Si.

[Jason Thompson]

He wouldn't have been watsed. He would have been applying his genius to developing more effective ways of clubbing said mammoth to death and working out which bits give the best fur for keeping warm and which should be used to make rugs, and what uses the other parts can be put to.

There is a popular misconception that genius requires complex understanding of science. It doesn't. Genius and intelligence are defined by what you can do with available knowledge and resources.

Steven Hawking, however would have died much younger back then....

[Si Hunt]

Surely our Caveman Genius would not have been able to help anyone outside of his own tribe in those days though, where-as now such intellect has the means to change the world.

Si.

[SiHart]

Yes, but if what he did allowed the tribe to survive when it might have been wiped out, then that tribe would go on, being stronger and thus would change the whole world because there were less people.

Well it made sense when i was thinking about it.

[Jason Thompson]

That doesn't mean he would be wasted. The tribe learns, the tribe improves, the tribe spreads and builds upon his input. Nowadays information can be broadcast all over the world in seconds, but that doesn't make the genius of those who existed before global communication was around any less impressive, surely? Was Aristotle wasted because he couldn't publish his stuff online? Or Pythagoras?

[SiHart]

Ahh, Jason, you put that more eloquently than I managed!

[Antony Cox]

I just can't imagine Stephen Hawing clubbing.

[Dirk Gently]

No disable-access night clubs near you?