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Stephen Hawking: modern cosmology's brightest star dies aged 76

RavenSky

RavenSky

The Doctor's Wife
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https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/mar/14/stephen-hawking-professor-dies-aged-76

Stephen Hawking, the brightest star in the firmament of science, whose insights shaped modern cosmology and inspired global audiences in the millions, has died aged 76

For fellow scientists and loved ones, it was Hawking’s intuition and wicked sense of humour that marked him out as much as the broken body and synthetic voice that came to symbolise the unbounded possibilities of the human mind.
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Indeed, and another reason I'd never want to live in the past. In any other century, I doubt he would have survived his thirties.

Kudos to the life's work of an inspiring man.
 
I'm sorry if I seem like a wet blanket, but it seems to me that he owed much of his celebrity to his disease, and not just to his scientific work. But it is indeed remarkable how much he had overcome his disease to be as productive as he was.
 
My dad was a science teacher at a middle school. I grew up hearing about Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan all of the time. Almost like they were relatives. It makes me sad to hear of his passing.
 
Titled OP link: Stephen Hawking, modern cosmology's brightest star, dies aged 76 | Science | The Guardian
Some of his most outspoken comments offended the religious. In his 2010 book, Grand Design, he declared that God was not needed to set the universe going, and in an interview with the Guardian a year later, dismissed the comforts of religious belief

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” he said.

He spoke also of death, an eventuality that sat on a more distant horizon than doctors thought. “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he said.
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Kryten would disagree. :D

He was a character in the SF TV series "Red Dwarf" who believed in "silicon heaven": "The iron will lie down with the lamp".
 
lpetrich said:
Titled OP link: Stephen Hawking, modern cosmology's brightest star, dies aged 76 | Science | The Guardian
Some of his most outspoken comments offended the religious. In his 2010 book, Grand Design, he declared that God was not needed to set the universe going, and in an interview with the Guardian a year later, dismissed the comforts of religious belief

“I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark,” he said.

He spoke also of death, an eventuality that sat on a more distant horizon than doctors thought. “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first,” he said.
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Kryten would disagree. :D

He was a character in the SF TV series "Red Dwarf" who believed in "silicon heaven": "The iron will lie down with the lamp".
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If there's no silicon heaven, where do all the calculators go?
 
I just watched him interviewed on Startalk last week. NDT asked him if he could,would he transfer his consciousness into a computer. He said yes because his body is basically useless.
 
Funny how it is saddening to hear of his passing, despite making it to such a ripe old age with the disease he suffered from. Mankind pretty much is stupid, but it continues to make giant leaps because of the bare few like Hawkings that can see the universe in ways few others can't even dream of. A great mind, a great loss.
bilby said:
Sad.

Still, a pretty good innings even for a perfectly healthy person; For an MND sufferer, 76 is an incredible age.
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To quote the Investor Business Daily editorial:
Investor Business Daily editorial said:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
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Hawking was so lucky that he lived in the UK instead of the UK. Otherwise his accomplishments wouldn't have been possible.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
To quote the Investor Business Daily editorial:
Investor Business Daily editorial said:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Click to expand...
Hawking was so lucky that he lived in the UK instead of the UK. Otherwise his accomplishments wouldn't have been possible.
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That was incredibly stupid.
 
I have met him a few times, though it was of course fairly impossible to have a conversation with him. I know some of his PhD students fairly well though.

He was a great scientist and will be missed.

We lost Richard Taylor (another great scientist) recently too. :(
 
I am so sorry that the world has lost this incredible man and his mind.

It is somewhat needless to say that the world is better off because this man lived and persevered in spite of having this horrible disease.

It is somewhat needless to say that I felt a kinship with Hawking because we shared this disease. At any time there are only some thousands of people in the world who have this form of ALS/MND that allows the mixed blessing of living longer while having to live longer with the consequences of the disease, to die in slow motion.

It is fortunate that Hawking lived in the UK rather than in the US. The NHS provided around the clock care for him, something that is financially out of reach for most people in the US who have the disease.
 
People have overinflated his contributions to science to be honest. If you asked a physicist to list what he or she considered the top 5 most important physicist alive as of yesterday, I doubt Hawking would have been on the list for many.

He is however ridiculously important as a popularizer of science and as a public figure representing science. Among the popular public figures from physics in recent years, I would say his work was more important than Tyson, Sagan, or Krauss. Using quantum physics to describe what goes on in massive black holes was an incredible leap. Most people would never have dreamed of using the math of the very tiny to describe some of the most massive objects.

He will be missed.
 
lpetrich said:
I'm sorry if I seem like a wet blanket, but it seems to me that he owed much of his celebrity to his disease, and not just to his scientific work. But it is indeed remarkable how much he had overcome his disease to be as productive as he was.
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The general public does inflate his importance, but then they don't read physics papers any more than I do. His is the name they hear most often, so they draw conclusions from that.
 
I feel melancholy for atheist physicists who seem obsessed by the search for a godless theory of everything.
I wonder if that motivation kept Stephen Hawking alive beyond what many scientists expected would be a short life.
 
Jimmy Higgins said:
Funny how it is saddening to hear of his passing, despite making it to such a ripe old age with the disease he suffered from. Mankind pretty much is stupid, but it continues to make giant leaps because of the bare few like Hawkings that can see the universe in ways few others can't even dream of. A great mind, a great loss.
bilby said:
Sad.

Still, a pretty good innings even for a perfectly healthy person; For an MND sufferer, 76 is an incredible age.
Click to expand...
To quote the Investor Business Daily editorial:
Investor Business Daily editorial said:
People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.
Click to expand...
Hawking was so lucky that he lived in the UK instead of the UK. Otherwise his accomplishments wouldn't have been possible.
Click to expand...

However they are saying that if he was 22 again developing his disease in the UK now, the chance that he’d be able to achieve as much are slim, due to cutbacks in the NHS by conservatives. Hawking himself was very outspoken about the cuts.

An opinion piece in the Guardian about it today:

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...ould-never-survive-in-todays-age-of-austerity
 
Lion IRC said:
I feel melancholy for atheist physicists who seem obsessed by the search for a godless theory of everything.
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Well you are free to prove that a god exists, but honestly, even if something omniscient came before us, we'd have no way to know if it was a god or just really powerful. Science is about being able to predict future outcomes and understand processes and universe. You can't rely on god and call it science, because it isn't predictable. Besides Cthulhu wouldn't want it any other way.
I wonder if that motivation kept Stephen Hawking alive beyond what many scientists expected would be a short life.
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Probably doctor stuff helped.
 
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