Remembering Stephen Hawking
Still frame from a NASA movie (Image Source: Phys.org, click on image for more info.)
This blog post won’t be a long one–it is just a short remembrance of Stephen Hawking who passed away earlier this week. My interest in Hawking’s work came because I’m interested–no, fascinated–by Black Holes. Even before I saw the Disney movie Black Hole, I had encountered them in children’s astronomy books that I’d checked out from the library–and a popular science paperback that I bought from the library’s book-sale.
Every so often, I would see the name Stephen Hawking appear/pop-up in relation to something Black Hole related. So, in the pre-Internet days of my childhood (Internet existed, but not something that consumers could access), I didn’t really know who he was. However, in the mid-80s, his popularity grew from Academics into Popular Culture and I started seeing him on PBS shows related to science like Nova (this is where I saw him the most), Sixty Minutes, and even on episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, so I got to see him and understand his importance to science.
[image error]
I have his book, A Brief History of Time, but while I’ve gotten to Chapter 2 or 3, I have to admit, it starts off with a discussion of Newtonian Physics and the history of cosmology (as I recall), but what I was after was the information on, you guessed it, Black Holes, so I stopped reading. I will pick it back up–I’m going to try to make finishing it this year a goal.
Anyway, I just wanted to say, that I while I did not ever get a chance to see, meet, or hear Stephen Hawking in person, he did touch my life tangentially through our shared fascination with Black Holes and their inherent properties, and thanks to the power of television, both PBS shows like Nova and more popular fare like Star Trek the Next Generation, I really got to feel like I knew Mr. Hawking quite well.
You will be missed!
Sidney
Read Skin Deep for Free at Aurora Wolf
Read Childe Roland for Free at Electric Spec
Read Faerie Knight in the anthology Fae, Rhonda Parrish, Ed. or the Kindle Edition
Read Ship of Shadows in the anthology Visions IV: Space Between Stars, Carrol Fix, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
Read WarLight in the anthology Visions VI: Galaxies, Carrol Fix, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
Read Dragonhawk in the magazine Tales of the Talisman, Vol. 8, Iss. 3, David Lee Summers, Ed. or the Kindle Edition.
