The Late, Great Star of Hypothetical Astrophysics

“I heard him lecture. We were in the same room together several times but we didn’t converse, because you’d have to wait a long time for each sentence. As a scientist, he was one of the greatest of our time, with his series of discoveries in the field of Einstein’s theory of gravity, black holes, the origin of the universe, and the connection between them and quantum theory."
"His disease and his struggle with it captured everyone’s imagination. It was amazing to see how in his condition he established a family, wrote books, and always continued to work."
"On one occasion we went out, several scientists, [at Stanford University] to a restaurant in Los Angeles. [Hawking] really loved steak and this time too he ordered steak, which they would put in a blender for him so he could eat it. He usually would listen to the conversations around him because of his difficulty in talking to people, but when he finally did speak, people waited on every word out of his mouth, even if it took time. And on his part, he would choose the right words and try to squeeze as much meaning as possible into every word."
"I thought it was wrong to mix up politics and science because science is universal. Of course, I also wasn’t happy with a boycott of Israel, it is opposed to the spirit of science and doesn’t help anything. Therefore I was at the top of a letter from Israeli scientists that was sent to him on the issue. We asked him to take it back and we never received a reply."
Professor Barak Kol, head, Physics Department, Hebrew University

British physicist Stephen Hawking answers questions during an interview in Orlando, Florida, April 25, 2007. Photo: Reuters / Charles W Luzier / File.

"[Finding a] theory of everything [would allow humankind to] know the mind of God. A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step; our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence."
"...But one can't help asking the question: Why does the universe exist? I don't know an operational way to give the question or the answer, if there is one, a meaning. But it bothers me."
"Asking what happens before the Big Bang is like asking for a point one mile north of the North Pole."
"We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet."
"If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans."
British scientist, astro-physicist, cosmologist, Stephen Hawking

Nature was both kind and unkind to this extraordinary man in gifting him with a mind capable of thinking in a manner that few others who have existed on Earth have done. However, though this man was so gifted with genius, he was given the cruel blow of a mind existing in a thoroughly incapacitated body that over time failed catastrophically. On the other hand, most people diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) -- a dread degenerative disease that eventually destroys the nervous system -- die in relatively short order, this man lived for 55 years with ALS.

He lived to astound the scientific community with the capacity of his mind and the unique quality of his analytical capabilities, his thoughts and hypotheses. He has been acclaimed as the greatest living scientist during his lifetime, one among a very few that have graced this planet over the millennia. Where Albert Einstein brought science forward with his great leaps into the universal unknown of time and space in his own time, Stephen Hawking followed in that great scientist's universe-explicating wake.

Just as Albert Einstein's avuncular face and electrified hair was familiar to the larger world, so too was Stephen Harking's disease-contorted face.

British physicist Stephen Hawking, whose decision to boycott a conference in Israel has been described as hypocritical. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

"Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free", he assured any who might have contemplated feeling sorry for a man who had no such feelings for his own plight. He was elevated to academia's most prestigious scientific post as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University and remained throughout his long life to age 76 -- 55 of those years with ALS -- fixated in a search for physics' ultimate goal, the "unified theory" of "everything". Despite his great acclaim, he never won a Nobel prize in science, since none of his theories have yet been proven.

Even so, his place in science and history and his remarkable capacity to endure the disease that destroyed his body leaving his mind untouched and vibrantly alive to the need to reach his full intellectual potential second to none he was, when all is said and done, all too human. His decision to abandon the wife of his early years with whom he had three children was not of her choosing, when his decision was to marry another woman, a woman married to an expert who helped him acquire a computerized 'voice', and who acted as a nurse to him.

That this man of science and universal acclaim as the world's premier living scientist decided to boycott Israeli academia and Israeli scientists for a social political movement that was based on a veneer of slanderous intent to condemn and demonize the State of Israel without taking into account the complexities woven into the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in its own way goes a distance to identifying his intellectual brilliance with historical laziness that confuses slander with justice. Pity, that.

"Hawking's decision to join the boycott of Israel is quite hypocritical for an individual who prides himself on his whole intellectual accomplishment. His whole computer-based communications system runs on a chip designed by Israel's Intel team."
"I suggest if he truly wants to pull out of Israel he should also pull out his Intel Core i7 from his tablet."
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner,  Shurat HaDin, Israeli law centre (2013)

The biggest mystery. (Courtesy Robin Dienel/Carnegie Institution for Science/Handout via Reuters

"In my 2000 paper, I pointed out the fact that experimental physicists had failed to find any evidence for Hawking Radiation, and I predicted neither will be there any such evidence in [the] future because there could not be any exact horizon, any exact black hole in the first place."
"Accordingly, I exerted that there is really no Black Hole Information Paradox."
Abhas Mitra, former senior scientist, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), Mumbai, India