Last night I went to go see celebrity physicist Stephen Hawking give a lecture entitled “To Boldly Go: My Life in Physics” with Natalie and my advisor, Mark. There were a lot of American accents in the room… in fact, all the questions at the end of the talk sounded like they were from Americans. Mark and I theorized that it was because (a) since Hawking is a professor here at Cambridge, it’s not unusual for British students here to have a chance to see him, and (b) perhaps the Americans are more obsessed with celebrity in general? I know I went as much to say I attended a Stephen Hawking lecture as I did to hear his thoughts on Physics.
All that aside, I was surprised at how much I followed considering I hadn’t had a Physics class since high school. I was also amazed at his very keen and witty sense of humor (I’ve never read his books), and how even using that clunky outboard voice synthesizer (25 years old and he still uses the same one) he can express an excellent sense of timing when cracking jokes. Of course, the lecture was all prepared in advance. His ALS is so advanced he can only communicate now by pointing an infared headset at a monitor and twitching his cheek to trigger things like a slide change or to recite the next paragraph.
How, then, did he handle the Q&A at the end? Painstakingly… it takes about 10 minutes to compose a 10 second response. The last question of the evening was, “If you could ask God one thing, what would it be?” His answer? “Why did you have to make M-theory so difficult?”
(Note: Natalie and I both forgot the camera, so the image above was snagged from someone else on Flickr.)