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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Joins the pantheon of greats. Sits comfortably with Newton and Einstein.
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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Some obituaries:
Roger Penrose
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-obituary
BBC
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15555565
NY Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/obituaries/stephen-hawking-dead.html
| Roger Penrose wrote: | ...
Of course, such a romanticised image can represent but a partial truth. Those who knew Hawking would clearly appreciate the dominating presence of a real human being, with an enormous zest for life, great humour, and tremendous determination, yet with normal human weaknesses, as well as his more obvious strengths.
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Despite his terrible physical circumstance, he almost always remained positive about life. He enjoyed his work, the company of other scientists, the arts, the fruits of his fame, his travels. He took great pleasure in children, sometimes entertaining them by swivelling around in his motorised wheelchair. Social issues concerned him. He promoted scientific understanding. He could be generous and was very often witty. On occasion he could display something of the arrogance that is not uncommon among physicists working at the cutting edge, and he had an autocratic streak. Yet he could also show a true humility that is the mark of greatness.
Hawking had many students, some of whom later made significant names for themselves. Yet being a student of his was not easy. He had been known to run his wheelchair over the foot of a student who caused him irritation. His pronouncements carried great authority, but his physical difficulties often caused them to be enigmatic in their brevity. An able colleague might be able to disentangle the intent behind them, but it would be a different matter for an inexperienced student.
To such a student, a meeting with Hawking could be a daunting experience. Hawking might ask the student to pursue some obscure route, the reason for which could seem deeply mysterious. Clarification was not available, and the student would be presented with what seemed indeed to be like the revelation of an oracle – something whose truth was not to be questioned, but which if correctly interpreted and developed would surely lead onwards to a profound truth. Perhaps we are all left with this impression now.
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Last edited by K on Mon Mar 19, 2018 12:40 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Joins the pantheon of greats. Sits comfortably with Newton and Einstein. |
“Sits comfortably”? |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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Hawking’s colleagues share remembrances:
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.4.20180314a/full/
[continually updated]
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/opinion/stephen-hawking-death-.html
https://www.storycollider.org/stories/2016/1/1/sean-carroll-what-would-stephen-hawking-do
[audio]
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/stephen-hawking-sean-carroll-physics-airport/555764/
| Bernard Carr wrote: | ...
My relationship with Stephen was not the usual type of supervisor–student relationship. In those days, before he had his entourage of nurses and assistants, students would have to help him in various ways on account of his disability. That was not an arduous task, but it did mean that one’s relationship with him became quite intimate. I shared an office with him, lived with his family for a while, and accompanied him as he travelled the world giving talks and collecting medals. People sometimes ask me if working with Stephen was the high point of my career. I hope not—that would imply that it has been downhill since the start—but it was certainly a tremendous privilege.
...
On matters of physics, I always regarded Stephen as an oracle, with just a few words from him yielding insights that would have taken weeks to work out on my own. However, Stephen was only human, and not all encounters led to illumination. Once I asked a question about something that was puzzling me. He thought about it silently for several minutes, and I was quite impressed with myself for asking something that Stephen couldn’t answer immediately. His eyes then closed, and I was even more impressed with myself because he was clearly having to think about it very deeply. Only after some time did it become clear that he had fallen asleep!
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He clearly enjoyed his fame and valued the opportunity it brought him to popularize physics and highlight various sociopolitical issues. I recall one lunch at Caltech in 1975 when we were debating the nature of fame. He finally defined it as being a state in which one is known by more people than one knows. On the way back to the office, a passing stranger said hi. When I asked who that was, he answered, “That was fame”—a nice illustration of his quick wit. Ten years later the number of people who knew him was probably a million times the number he knew, so he probably modified his definition!
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| Leonard Mlodinow wrote: |
I always thought that Stephen Hawking would outlive me. I broke into tears when I heard on Wednesday that he had not.
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When a man is given three years to live at 21, and he dies 55 years later, it shouldn’t come as a shock. But though I’m 15 years younger than Stephen was, and he had been gravely ill for years, if you knew him you couldn’t help thinking that he would always be around, that his life force was inexhaustible, that he would always have another miracle to pull off.
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What you don’t often hear about Stephen is that he loved a good curry, but not if it was spicy. That he considered himself allergic to gluten, but that he wouldn’t notice when his caregivers occasionally let some slip through. That he ate bananas mashed with kiwi every day. That he had to eat all his food mashed or chopped, and had to be spoon-fed. And that he never let this embarrass him, even when he ate in the finest restaurants.
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| Sean Carroll wrote: | ...
But what I will remember is Stephen’s tireless enjoyment in life. At a cosmology conference in England’s Lake District, the organizers had scheduled a tasting of Scotch whiskeys as an evening’s diversion. As the group of physicists chatted and sampled the wares, I turned around to see Stephen in the back of the room, his nurses helping him taste the various single malts, one by one. His body may have been frail, but his enthusiasm for living was unmatched.
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| Bill Unruh wrote: | ...
Stephen was a person who lived on will. Despite not having a working body, he was able to bend the world around him to his will and to live and see more than most. The biggest shame was that his inability for quick communication meant that he could not participate in those arguments, those disagreements, that we all need to refine and test our ideas. I recall in the late 1970s, just after he and Gary Gibbons had extended my work on accelerated detectors to de Sitter space, we were alone in his office arguing. Suddenly there was one word in the explanation he gave that I did not understand. He repeated the phrase at least five times, growing more and more frustrated, but my mind was simply unable to convert the sounds into words. To have accomplished as much as he did and more than almost all other physicists and despite such handicaps all around him was astonishing. It was amazing to have known him.
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Science journalists too:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/science/stephen-hawking-life.html
| Dennis Overbye wrote: |
Stephen Hawking, the English cosmologist and black hole maven, liked to say he was born 300 years to the day after Galileo died, and he died on Wednesday, 139 years after Albert Einstein was born.
That was a fitting bookend.
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“His sense of humor was legendary,” said Kip Thorne, his old friend and recent Nobel laureate from Caltech, with whom he collaborated on the seeds of what would become the movie “Interstellar.” “When he started a sentence, laboriously on his computer, I never knew whether it would end in a deep pearl of wisdom or an off-the-wall joke,” Dr. Thorne said in an email.
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He didn’t always appreciate the attention. He was mad when he came home one day in Cambridge and found me interviewing Jane, his wife at the time. And frustrated by my obstinate refusal to understand some point of quantum physics (that I still don’t understand), he ran over my toes in an elevator with his wheelchair.
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Last edited by K on Thu Mar 22, 2018 11:17 am; edited 4 times in total |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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I admit I’ve never really known much about him, apart from some of his inspiring quotes. Saw a Facebook short film about his life. I didn’t realise he was in his 20 when life smacked him in the teeth. Pretty amazing. Certainly the world is a better place for him being here. May he now finally RIP.
_________________
You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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Colleague John Preskill on Stephen and their famous bets:
http://time.com/5201371/stephen-hawking-john-preskill-obituary/
Old NY Times news articles on the bets:
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/12/us/a-bet-on-a-cosmic-scale-and-a-concession-sort-of.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/world/about-those-fearsome-black-holes-never-mind.html
| John Preskill wrote: | ...
With our friend Kip Thorne, we made some of those bets “official,” and we were all taken aback by how much attention they received. Stephen conceded our most famous bet (regarding whether black holes destroy information) in 2004, before an audience in Dublin of 700 scientists and at least 50 reporters from print and electronic media. To pay off, he presented me with Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia. You can’t buy one of those in Ireland, so Stephen’s assistant had arranged to have it shipped overnight just in time. Not knowing what else to do, I held the book over my head as though I had just won the Wimbledon final, while a million flashbulbs were popping (it seemed like a million, anyway). One of those pictures wound up in Time.
We made bets for fun, but the scientific issues in question, founded on some of Stephen’s most far-reaching contributions, are ones many physicists passionately care about. Combining extraordinary depth of thought with an irrepressible sense of play, that’s what I’ll remember best about Stephen Hawking.
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| D. Overbye (NY Times, 22 July, 2004) wrote: | ...
The new results are hardly likely to be the last word, either about the black hole information problem or about black-hole travel. Few physicists agree with the approach Dr. Hawking is using in his new calculation. Nobody knows how to weigh the different possibilities in such a quantum calculation, said Dr. Sean Carroll of the University of Chicago.
In conceding the bet, Dr. Hawking offered Dr. Preskill a cricket encyclopedia but said that Dr. Preskill, being ''all American,'' refused. So Dr. Hawking had a copy of ''Total Baseball: The Ultimate Baseball Encyclopedia'' flown in.
Dr. Hawking's partner in the bet, Dr. Thorne, is sticking to his guns for now. Dr. Hawking commented, ''If Kip agrees to concede the bet later, he can pay me back later.''
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Last edited by K on Mon Mar 19, 2018 12:54 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | stui magpie wrote: | | Joins the pantheon of greats. Sits comfortably with Newton and Einstein. |
“Sits comfortably”? |
_________________
Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Skids 
Quitting drinking will be one of the best choices you make in your life.
Joined: 11 Sep 2007
Location: Joined 3/6/02 . Member #175
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Pies4shaw wrote: | | stui magpie wrote: | | Joins the pantheon of greats. Sits comfortably with Newton and Einstein. |
“Sits comfortably”? |
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_________________
Don't count the days, make the days count. |
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swoop42 
Whatcha gonna do when he comes for you?
Joined: 02 Aug 2008
Location: The 18
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| stui magpie wrote: | | Pies4shaw wrote: | | stui magpie wrote: | | Joins the pantheon of greats. Sits comfortably with Newton and Einstein. |
“Sits comfortably”? |
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His wheelchair was the best money could buy. 
I believe that's where P4S was going with that.
_________________
He's mad. He's bad. He's MaynHARD! |
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/science/stephen-hawking-westminster-abbey.html
| Quote: | ...
His ashes will be interred in the Abbey in a ceremony “of thanksgiving” to be held later this year.
He will be in good company. Sir Isaac Newton was buried in the Abbey in 1727. Charles Darwin was buried beside him in 1882. More recently, the physicists Ernest Rutherford in 1937 and Joseph John Thomson in 1940 have been interred there.
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Dr. Hawking often said that he wanted a formula describing what is called Hawking radiation ... engraved on his tombstone. One hopes that the Abbey will follow through.
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-physicists-farewell-to-stephen-hawking
| David Kaiser wrote: | ...
... I remember sitting with some of his assistants late into the night, lost amid the buzz and hum. To be in the vicinity of Hawking was to be immersed in an extended web of activity, of people and machines clicking together, a phenomenon documented in the anthropologist Hélène Mialet’s fascinating study “Hawking Incorporated.”
Almost two decades later, I had a different sort of encounter with Hawking. Last year, several colleagues and I invited him to join a letter we were writing, trying to articulate for a broad audience some of the most significant insights that cosmologists had developed and tested about the earliest moments in cosmic history. At first, Hawking objected to the wording of a particular paragraph. My colleagues, who had known him for decades, assumed that he would never change his mind; he could be famously stubborn. Being innocent of that experience, I suggested a modest change to address his concern. I will never forget the euphoria, the next day, when I received the e-mail from his assistant saying that Hawking liked the edit and would co-sign the letter. Hawking might have generated enduring truths about the cosmos, but at least I could tame a wayward dependent clause or two.
I imagine that Hawking’s well-known stubbornness helped keep him alive. He refused to succumb to his disease, outliving his original prognosis by half a century. But the side of him I think of most is his sense of humor, and even showmanship. How fitting, I have often thought, that as he lost control over most of the muscles in his face, his expression settled into an impish grin.
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K
Joined: 09 Sep 2011
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