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Stephen Hawking
Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2018 3:55 am
by Moe
My brother sent me a text at 2:45 this morning (3/14/18) informing me that Stephen Hawking passed away.
One of my coworkers said that he saw it kind of fitting that he passed on Pi Day.
Here's a link to one of many articles about it
Pretty remarkable considering that back in 1963, he was told that he only had 2 years to live.
Re: Stephen Hawking
Posted: Thu Mar 15, 2018 12:59 pm
by Wesley
Stephen Hawking had a brilliant mind and the commitment to Science that precluded his pride. In the second edition of A Brief History Of Time, he corrected a calculation that had been presented in the first edition. Apparently he underestimated the total mass of the Universe, and predicted that after the Big Bang, things were slowing down and would eventually reverse and fall back to a singularity that he called the Big Crunch.
Yeah, well when observations showed that not only is the expansion of The Universe not slowing down, but it is actually accelerating, he took a closer look, reconsidered, revised his theory and printed a retraction. "Oops, screwed that one up." When you have arguably the biggest brain on Earth and you can admit that you made a mistake that millions of people read in your book, and you can just as quickly correct yourself and admit that you were wrong.... that shows some serious strength of character. Not only that, but some of the new calculations lead to acknowledging the existence of Dark Matter, which is still a hot ticket these days.
I don't know him personally, but I am going to miss him.