Late last night I heard the news that celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking, 76, had died. He wrote the bestseller A Brief History of Time, becoming a superstar of sorts. It wasn't just because he was a brilliant scientist. He also battled a disease, ALS, since the early 1960s, certainly becoming one of the longest survivors in history with that usually fatal illness. It didn't matter how disabled he was by it physically, for he continued with his work.
I am surprised nobody has done a biopic on him yet.
Hawking was renowned in several scientific fields including mathematics, physics, astronomy, and cosmology (I almost wrote cosmetology--LOL).
He was the scientist who helped come up with the "big bang theory" and "black holes."
Getting on my soapbox, his life story should be an inspiration to all and should tell assholes who despise the disabled and are in favor of "assisted" suicide they can go fuck themselves. Somebody should tell that bastard Peter Singer about Hawking's life, which is by no means unique in that physically disabled, even those with profound disabilities, have lives worth living. People with profound developmental disabilities also have lives worth living. Who the hell decides whose life is worth living?
The ironical kicker is that Hawking endorsed that bullshit, which shows me that even the brightest people in the world can come up with some truly idiotic opinions. He was really lucky neither one of his wives had larceny in their hearts and decided to have him bumped off.
That is what I immediately thought about when I heard about Hawking having died. He was married twice, had three children, and three grandchildren.
With fellow physicist Roger Penrose, Hawking merged Einstein's theory of relativity with quantum theory to suggest that space and time would begin with the Big Bang and end in black holes. Hawking also discovered that black holes were not completely black but emit radiation and would likely eventually evaporate and disappear.
New York Times:
Nobody, including Dr. Hawking, believed it at first — that particles could be coming out of a black hole. “I wasn’t looking for them at all,” he recalled in an interview in 1978. “I merely tripped over them. I was rather annoyed.”
That calculation, in a thesis published in 1974 in the journal Nature under the title “Black Hole Explosions?,” is hailed by scientists as the first great landmark in the struggle to find a single theory of nature — to connect gravity and quantum mechanics, those warring descriptions of the large and the small, to explain a universe that seems stranger than anybody had thought.
The discovery of Hawking radiation, as it is known, turned black holes upside down. It transformed them from destroyers to creators — or at least to recyclers — and wrenched the dream of a final theory in a strange, new direction.
“You can ask what will happen to someone who jumps into a black hole,” Dr. Hawking said in an interview in 1978. “I certainly don’t think he will survive it.
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