Reports are coming in the Stephen Hawking has died peacefully at the relatively ripe age of 76. His death comes only 55 years after he was given two years to live. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5498269/Professor-Stephen-Hawking-dead-76.html
Yes he has died. I continue to find it amazing that a mathematician can function without being able to write. A great scientist, and paradoxically a great science communicator, in spite of being unable to speak! Perhaps too a shining example of overcoming adversity through will. He must have had a very fulfilling life, in spite of all the physical handicaps. Perhaps also, a nice success story for the National Health Service, which has kept him alive all these years.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/14/health/stephen-hawking-dead/index.html eh, I haven't gathered my own thoughts, yet. Yeah but my first thought was really, he was diagnosed with his disease before I was born.
“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.” — Interview in The New York Times, December 2004. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
I think that's amazing too. He must have been able to imagine it in his head somehow. If not the precise details of the actual formalism, at least some intuitive sense for the kind of relationships they symbolize. Being forced to do that might arguably have aided his understanding. True. The rather slow and cumbersome way he communicated by computer forced him to be pithy and prevented him from being too wordy. Very true and everyone is saying that. But I suspect that he would prefer that everyone remember him not for his physical handicaps, but rather as a physicist and a man. There was a real human being trapped in that body. That's probably a cultural thing. In the United States, in California at least, it's most common to refer to academics (at least formally) as "Dr. So-and-so". (Many of them think that's too formal and prefer to get on a first name basis as quickly as possible.) Calling them "Professor So-and-so" sounds faintly off, a little Germanic.
Yes I think it is cultural. In Europe the professor is the head of department, so it is very prestigious to be one. In the States, professor seems to mean more or less what we might call a "don" i.e.a teaching academic.
Yes, IMO it's the "mind" that defines the individual, not the body which is host to the brain/mind. I see an abstract comparison to the brain/mind of the Cuttlefish, which has one of the most vulnerable bodies, but ranks very high in brain/mind abilities of aquatic species. As one researcher said; "the cuttlefish is basically a brain encased in superflexible skin."
Perhaps one of the elements I personally find disturbing about the legacy of Hawking is his notion that we need to immediately focus on colanizing other planets. In one sense I guess its natural for a specialist to orchestrate an over arching world view or establish a polemic that highlights their field .... but if you want to talk of him as a leader in thought amongst intelligent persons, its kind of short sighted to advocate an abandon-ship policy imho.
Well, if quantum theory is right - and it so far seems to have passed all the tests set for it - then Einstein was wrong when he asserted the contrary.
