Stephen Hawking 'very ill' | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Hawking 'very ill'

cnn.com

144 pointskf57 comments

During the 1973-74 academic year, Hawking was a visiting professor at Caltech, and I was a junior in the physics program. The first signs something was up were the wheelchair ramps that appeared around Bridge Laboratory, the older physics building. Hawking made his debut by giving the weekly physics colloquium talk in the large lecture room. At that time, he could still speak well enough to give a lecture in his own voice (with a microphone), and he started into some brand new, mind boggling stuff about black holes evaporating. The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row, and half way through, he asks a question. It was the kind of question that reveals he was following along just fine. The two titans proceeded to have a back and forth exchange for a few minutes in front of the assembled masses, and then Hawking continued with his talk. It was awesome and humbling to witness that, and my friends and I, sitting way up in the back rows, just shook our heads.

I am jealous. That must have been a fantastic exchange to witness! I have always enjoyed the ease with which Hawking talks about these complex theories - he does it so well.

Who do I need to listen to, and where do I need to be, to have this sort of story 30 years from now?

Try MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).

I've been told by some folks who've interacted with Tegmark that some of those papers are really just elaborate pranks on his part to create radically implausible but logically consistent models, or something to that extent

Caltech is still a good bet. A few years ago I sat next to Hawking at Kip Thorne's 60th birthday party. Even more fun was being seated at the dinner table with Hawking's nurses, who told more than one story I'm not at liberty to repeat on Hacker News. ;-)

... but .... but, infinite karma is within your reach! How can you ignore that? :)

I should have mentioned that talking with Hawking himself was fun, but also very, very slow...

Google? YCombinator?

"The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row"

Simply the sheer awesomeness (for lack of more eloquent words) of this sort of meeting between the titans actually sent chills down my spine.

Absolutely! My favourite bit from "A Beautiful Mind" -- the book -- is still that early chapter describing what an astonishing collection of intelligence Princeton had attracted at that point time (1930s): Einstein, Goedel, von Neumann, Church, Fine,...

The pressure was so intense that the average completion time for a PhD was 2 years! (And when he arrived, Nash himself was apparently just bitter about not being offered a scholarship by Harvard).

Any possibility that the exchange was recorded in some way?

Easy to forgot how recent it is that any talk or lecture is likely to have been video recorded and already available on the web somewhere.

I'd try calling the library ( http://library.caltech.edu/about/contactus.php ), giving the subject and date information, and asking where you might start looking. You are going to be fighting an uphill battle against the odds (probably any recording has been lost or destroyed), but it is within the realm of probability.

I have chills down my spine too :D

A great privilege, your experience that day, I got goosebumps just imagining it.

Is there a transcript, audio, or video of the event in existence?

Hawking was born on what turned out to be an auspicious date: January 8, 1942 -- the 300th anniversary of the death of astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei.

It didn't "turn out" to be an auspicious date. They'd already known the date Galileo died. That it even makes the date "auspicious" is debatable. There are only 365ish days to be born on. Repeats aren't a surprise.

I think the surprise here isn't just that he was born on January 8th, but also that he was born in 1942 which made it exactly 300 years to the day.

With that said, I still don't find it to be a big deal that the date lined up with Galileo's death.

Number of famous scientists/thinkers * at least 2 (birthday, day of death, could probably include other significant days in their lives) leaves an awfully high probability that most days line up with someone famous. Divide that by the number of years people take as significant (probably any mulitple of 50) and the number is reduced somewhat but still for someone so rational it seems odd to always bring this up.

Very true. In a group of 23 randomly selected people, there is just over 50% chance that two share the same birthday. Two great articles about this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_paradox

http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.birthdayprob.html

Don't tell that to astrologers, otherwise they might make Mars align with Jupiter and that will crash your code with an unknown exception.

An astrologer may also tell you the moon is in void of course and to wait until tomorrow to make your release :]

The funniest example of how that's just probability was when this problem was discussed in my bachelor's class of about 60 people, and the prof confidently starts asking us for our dates of birth, and there was not even 1 matching pair. The probability is apparently around .01%

365! / ((365-60)! 365^60) = 0.0059

So it's about 1%, assuming uniform distribution of birthdays. Since they're not quite uniformly distributed, the actual odds of 60 people with no common birthdays is a little lower than that.

However, given the thousands of people reading HN who experienced such a classroom exercise, the odds are very good that someone like you will pipe up ;-)

We discussed this in an Algebra class during highschool--she actually sat us by birthdate. Turns out two people shared my birthday and she made us take out our IDs because she thought it was some sort of ruse. 10% of the class with the same birthday is a bit odd, but we all had fun calculating the actual odds.

Out of curiosity, how did the class determine whether anyone shared a birthday? The best way I can think of is lining up by order and then seeing if your neighbors share your birthday. Is that how you did it? Is there a better way to do it?

everyone says out their birthday in order of seating(randomly seated). If someone hears their birthday, they shout out of turn.

I guess you were expecting an algorithm faster than O(n)? That was the best we could do, given n processors with O(1) space each :-D

It is also highly auspicious that if you sum all the letters in "stephen hawking" you get 160, which is also the sum of all letters in "extra potatoe".

Coincidence? I think not. I tried to alert CNN.com to this, but they are apparently hushing it up.

Dan?

Whoever down voted this clearly does not recall Vice-President Quayle's faux paux to which this comment refers.

I don't. What was it?

http://www.capitalcentury.com/1992.html

I like the ending.

"Now, fast forward five years to 1997, when The Trentonian decided to look up William Figueroa to see how he was doing after his hour of fame.

By then, he was a 17-year-old high school dropout who had fathered a child and was working a low-paying job at an auto showroom."

Yeah, don't call anybody an idiot for a small error...

I got the reference, I just don't find 'references' funny. I don't see it's a joke (or otherwise interesting) for a commenter to remind us, that like the parent commenter, former Vice President Dan Quayle also mispelled "potato" in 1992.

When I visited the Unix room at Bell Labs in 1993, there was a picture of Dan Quayle before a blackboard with the famous misspelling. Below the the picture was the text "My heroe -- Ken Thompson".

It "turned out" to be auspicious because Stephen Hawking wasn't born a physicist. When he became one, then his January 8 birthday "turned out" to be auspicious.

I guess auspicious in terms of he turned out to be a great physicist - and therefore the date became pertinent.

Had he been, for example, a ballet dancer it wouldnt have been quite so interesting.

Also, whilst there are 365 days to be born on how many great physicists are there? And how many are born on the centenary of a previous great physicists death? The odds for that is a lot higher than 1/365 :)

How very sad, he was an icon I looked up to as a child. I still remember first reading his 'Brief History of Time.'

It's a little early to refer to him in the past tense.

Maybe the past tense refers to trickjarrett's childhood.

That was my intended use of it. My apologies for not writing more clearly.

What a great man. He survived 40+ years with a supposedly terminal condition... here's hoping that he can pull through again.

Ugh, just seen this on Twitter.

http://twitter.com/SaveTheGuns/status/1567102622

I dont see why people feel they have to get their shots in when someone is too ill to respond :( (not that it would affect him anyway - but the principle! the principle!)

I would hope that Stephen Hawking would have better things to do than respond on Twitter.

Don't let it get to you man :)

hehe I know :P

What do you expect from someone called "SaveTheGuns" ...

The 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with someone's feelings on Stephen Hawking's illness. So the fact that this guy is very pro-gun says nothing to this apparent dislike of Stephen Hawking.

Now, if his username was "GodHatesPhysicists", then his statement would be totally expected.

The very pro-gun attitude taken by the twitterer is correlated with other conservative attitudes, such as anti-science religiousity.

Not directly, no, but the union between "People who are obssessed with guns to the extent they create twitter accounts and websites called Save The Guns" and "Science-hating right-wing Christian fundamentalist rednecks" seems to be about 99%, so it's a reasonable assumption to make.

Does this kind of sentiment really belong in a thread about Stephen Hawking's illness?

Besides which, you're way off-base. Most of the guys at the range where I shoot are suburban dads. Many of them are irreligious (if not outright atheist/agnostic), most of the rest are religious in only the vaguest sense of the word. There are a few people with a lot of Jesus bumper stickers, but they've never been anything but polite to me.

You are right that there's more than the usual support for the Republicans, but that's to be expected. Why would gun owners favor the party that favors gun control?

Please read what I wrote: "People who are obssessed with guns to the extent they create twitter accounts and websites called Save The Guns". Not just anyone who happens to support gun rights, which I also do, as it happens.

I agree it is not really appropriate, let's leave it there.

I hope Hawking is the first man to achieve immortality (if he desires it), just to spite this guy.

hang in there Stephen!!

Sad story. Here is hoping Hawking gets better.

I would really be interested in his first experience after death...

Will he be able to find a way to communicate to us?

That would be really ingenious, because all of the rest is only opinion, and opinions are all and always questionable...

My first reaction upon seeing the headline was, "duh!"

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=ill

I actually thought that was kind of funny. He's pretty dope too.

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