STEPHEN WILLIAM HAWKING

 

From Sampath’s Desk:

 

 

STEPHEN WILLIAM HAWKING

(8 January 1942-14 March 2018) 

Stephen William Hawking, a rare intellectual star in the sky that was shining and sparkling for 76 years has fallen. When can we see him again, or at least a like of him?

         

Said he, “I am not afraid of death, but I am in no hurry to die”, but it is unfortunate that he has been snatched away from our midst. Once, he remarked, “I fell off the edge of the world”, jokingly rather. The one who found ‘black holes’ beyond our mother Earth has created black holes in our hearts by leaving us forever. Yes, an inspirational scientific era of the Nobel Prize-winning Physicist Professor Stephen Hawking has come to an end!

 

Stephen William Hawking was Britain’s Theoretical Physicist, Cosmologist, and author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology in the University of Cambridge. His Alma mater was University of Oxford (BA) and University of Cambridge (MA, Ph D). He stunned the world with his unmatched brainwork including theorems in physics.

Despite being confined to a wheelchair most of the time, he reached out to the stars on the sky. The film ‘The Theory of Everything’ made based around his life was a great and befitting tribute to this inspiring legendary scientist of our times, who fully dedicated his life to unlocking the secrets of the universe who believed science was his destiny. Remarkably, Hawking defied predictions that he would only live for a few years once he got paralyzed. overcoming his mobility-related issues besides speech disability. Still, he used to communicate via a computer speech synthesizer. 

 

Inside the shell of his increasingly useless body was a razor-sharp mind, fascinated by the nature of the Universe - how was it formed, how it might end and so on and so forth? 

 

His brainy contributions in Hawking Radiation, Penrose-Hawking Theorems, Bekenstein-Hawking Formula, Hawking Energy, Gibbons-Hawking effect, Gibbons-Hawking space, Gibbons-Hawking-York boundary term and Thorne-Hawking Preskill bet, among others, are an innovative and scientific treasure trove for generations. 

 

He strongly believed that there was nothing around before the Big Bang. His theory was based on the assumption that the universe has no boundaries. This was the pivot on which all his  theories and predictions were based on.

 

The Big Bang theory holds that the universe in retrospective can shrink to the size of an extremely small "subatomic ball" known as the singularity. According to him, the laws of physics and time cease to function inside that tiny particle of heat and energy. The ordinary real time as we know now shrinks infinitely as the universe becomes ever smaller but never reaches a definable starting point. He was decorated with many laurels and honours.  

 

He always warned against Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its growing dominance over humanity. He considered AI as ‘threat to humanity’ and was rather afraid that it may perhaps replace humans altogether one day, something unnatural and preposterous even to our imaginations. So, he remained steadfast and vociferous against the growing dominance of Artificial Intelligence.

 

According to him, if people design computer viruses, someone will design Artificial Intelligence that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans which will go on in an endless spiral divesting the humanity of its original intelligence and create robot-driven men, a dangerous fallout beset with bizarre consequences. The theoretical physicist kept on saying in the past that developments in AI have been so great that the machines will one day be more dominant that human beings.

 

“Earth is becoming too small and humanity is bound to self-destruct with AI replacing us as the dominant-being on the planet,” he told in November 2017.

 

In 2016, at the opening ceremony of Cambridge University’s AI Centre, he said that AI could either be ‘the best or worst invention’ humanity has ever made.

 

With his departure, a long inspirational journey of intellectual devotion towards humanity with a strong will power and positive attitude/approach in life that proved to the world that one can compensate far in excess of all his physical disability to remain positively active and constructively productive has ended. While doctors had written him off due to his contracting the disease when he was just 20, he displayed to the whole world that nothing was really lost and he could bounce back well to prove himself a great personality that he turned out to be despite the gloomy future predictions about his longevity - a great loss to the humanity indeed!.

 

His predictions that the Mother Earth could turn into Venus, human-race would have to colonize outer space in the next 200-250 years, warning about the prospect of hostile aliens from perhaps the other ‘Universes’, warning of the possibility of Artificial Intelligence (AI) replacing humans sooner or later, necessity for humans to leave the Earth to survive another million years, etc. are both mindboggling and exciting!

 

There's one thing that's certain and it's death; but how and when it comes is something that can't be in one's hands. Or can it be? Looking at how Hawking survived over half a century of being handed over the death sentence, the scales are tipping toward a 'yes'.

 

He has been inspiration-incarnate as he survived a condition that may seem spine-breaking to many. He proved to the world one thing - however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. And he indeed just didn't survive it; he succeeded. During the course of his ailment of a rare motor neuron disease, he did what even a healthy man of his age couldn't - his contribution to the field of physics, theoretical cosmology, gravitational theorems, general relativity, black holes and Hawking radiation - which all speak volumes of his intellect-driven percipience.

 

His is an irreparable loss to humanity likely to be felt for a long time to come. As the entire world bids adieu to Hawking, the vacuum created by him will be hard to fill.

 

He is immortal. Yes, his works have immortalized him.

 

 

R.SAMPATH

16/3/2018