{"id":10114,"date":"2018-03-14T13:24:21","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T17:24:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10114"},"modified":"2018-03-18T22:53:01","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T02:53:01","slug":"stephen-hawking-1942-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10114","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Hawking 1942-2018"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Front-page on every news source today is the sad report that Stephen Hawking died yesterday at the age of 76.  For the best description of his scientific accomplishments, I recommend the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/science\/2018\/mar\/14\/stephen-hawking-obituary\">obituary in the Guardian<\/a> written by his sometime collaborator Roger Penrose.<\/p>\n<p>I was going to write a little bit about one time I heard Hawking speak (or rather, his student interpret for us his speech), which was at the IAS back in the early 1980s.  I just noticed though that evidently John Baez was at the same talk (he was an undergrad, I was a grad student), and describes it well <a href=\"https:\/\/plus.google.com\/u\/0\/+johncbaez999\/posts\/AVWicrgyYQz\">here<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>At the time I remember that many thought that quantum gravity would be understood within a few years, and that Hawking would not be able to live longer than another year or two, given the nature of the disease he was suffering from.  It&#8217;s wonderful that the second of these turned out to be so wrong.<\/p>\n<p>While Hawking was already a star in the physics community back then, his celebrity with the wider public came later.  Of all the scientists who over the years have achieved some degree of celebrity, I can&#8217;t think of another one who so much both deserved and enjoyed the public attention.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> There are dozens of articles appearing discussing Hawking&#8217;s life and work. One you may not have seen which I enjoyed is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/view\/articles\/2018-03-15\/the-stephen-hawking-i-knew\">from Nathan Myhrvold<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong>  Another piece by someone who worked with Hawking, <a href=\"https:\/\/theconversation.com\/i-was-a-student-of-stephen-hawkings-heres-what-he-taught-me-93508\">Marika Taylor<\/a>.  It includes some discussion of his views on M-theory.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update<\/strong>:  Hawking has inspired some <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thetimes.co.uk\/article\/life-the-doniverse-and-everything-now-i-get-trump-b208bxmkj?shareToken=52427b486d8dcb81937f71429a09d9bd\">new theorizing from Niall Ferguson<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Front-page on every news source today is the sad report that Stephen Hawking died yesterday at the age of 76. For the best description of his scientific accomplishments, I recommend the obituary in the Guardian written by his sometime collaborator &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=10114\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10114"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10126,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10114\/revisions\/10126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}