Hawkin - tha amazing Stephen Hawkin

[Geoff Settle]

web page

 

 

The story of Professor Stephen Hawking's early years is told for the first time in a major drama for BBC Two.

....

Sunday 15 May 2005, 8pm BBC Two

(First shown April 2004)

 

Did anyone watch the April showing and is it worth a viewing?

 

[ 15.05.2005, 07:55: Message edited by: Geoff Settle ]

[Mary]

I really enjoyed his book and I think he's a fascinating man as well. To overcome such debilitating physical problems and see his mind so open and clear. Wish we could all be like him - well maybe not all but you know what I mean!

[Geoff Settle]

I managed to catch the programme last night and it was very good and trying to follow the theories was a challenge in itself if it wasn't for the great and clear way he gets his ideas across.

[Mary]

He is a genius Geoff - as I have said before they are different than normal, average folk!

[Jerry]

You might have been amused by the cartoon in yesterday's comics page. It's a one-panel with a caption. The line drawing (cartune) shows a muscular body builder who looks suspiciously like Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a deformed man in a wheelchair with an oxygen bottle - side by side on a viewing platform. The caption (can't remember exactly) was something like, 1980 Stephen Hawking can't believe they are awarding the Mr. Universe trophy to the other guy!

[Mary]

1942?, British theoretical physicist, b. Oxford, England, grad. University College, Oxford, 1962, Ph.D. Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1966. In 1962 Hawking was diagnosed as having an incurable muscular disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Although the disease eventually confined him to a wheelchair and forced him to use a computer-generated voice synthesizer to communicate, he continued to teach and to lecture and began his research in cosmology. In 1971 Hawking provided mathematical support for the big-bang theory of the origin of the universe; he showed that if the general theory of relativity was correct the universe must have a singularity, or starting point, in space-time.

 

This cosmological thread led him to the study of black holes and his suggestion that following the big bang primordial, or mini, black holes?objects of immense mass occupying only the space of an elementary particle?were formed. He also showed that the surface area of a black hole can increase but never decrease, that there is a limit on the radiation emitted when black holes collide, and that a single black hole cannot cleave into two black holes. In 1974 Hawking calculated that black holes thermally create and emit subatomic particles until they exhaust their energy and explode. This so-called Hawking radiation linked gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics mathematically for the first time. Hawking proposed in 1981 that although the universe has no boundary, it is finite in space-time; he collaborated with James Hartle to formulate this mathematically in 1983.

 

Hawking wrote an explanation of his work that became a popular bestseller, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (1988). He has also published Superspace and Supergravity (1981), The Very Early Universe (1983), Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays (1993), and The Nature of Space and Time (1995).

[Jerry]

Mary, And from interviews on PBS and printed interviews, the man has a very strong sense of humour.