Stephen Hawking dies.

[The Bedlington Terrier]

I watched our Ash smash that Exocet into Wet Spam's net on Saturday and I knew unequivocally at that precise moment, that there is a God.

[barrie_burn]

I watched our Ash smash that Exocet into Wet Spam's net on Saturday and I knew unequivocally at that precise moment, that there is a God.

Clever man Stephen.He writes a book called a "Brief History of Time".Sells 10 million copies and no one understands it but he makes a fortune.I did manage to get to Page 3 and then my brain started hurting.

[Balanbam00]

Blueheeler: ( and all others interested )

Then what is the goal or aim of human beings ? Is it just to have children? Is it just to live?

'' to have to work through puzzles and tests to find "Him". ?? Not everyone comes to a point in life where he /she realizes this (enlightenment?)On some occasions it happens ,then it may be that that person starts to ask,'' we are born ,we live our life ,then we die, Is that it ''? Then in reality there is nothing glorious to life?

If life is now going into a period of uncertainty,wars ,earthquakes, floods etc,perhaps in another 1000 years it will not be possible to live on this earth, why then have children, just to be born into this disaster? Born into suffering. There is no point!

[Supersub6]

You can all think as deeply as you wish about the meaning of life etc., etc., however, I have got to 71 without even thinking about it and I live stress free, in spite of what is going on in the wider world.
Balanbam --you say that it blah blah blah etc. there is no point, however, there is no point in worrying about something which may or may not happen because if it is going to happen --it will. I learned this back in 1985 when, as far as I was concerned, a life-changing event occurred over which I had no controland since that date I have never worried about anything, least of all, what life is all about.
Enjoy it while you are here is my philosophy and I certainly do ---to the annoyance of lots of friends who can't understand why I am like I am.

[sinkov]

Clever man Stephen.He writes a book called a "Brief History of Time".Sells 10 million copies and no one understands it but he makes a fortune.I did manage to get to Page 3 and then my brain started hurting.

You must be a bit of a numpty Barrie, I got to page 7 before he lost me.

Actually I read it all and quite enjoyed it, but although I got through it, to be honest for the most part I hadn't a clue what he was on about.

[Norder]

Then what is the goal or aim of human beings ? Is it just to have children? Is it just to live?

....as far as the repetitive system is concerned - i guess it'd simply be....birth/school/work/death.

As heeler said on S.H - "he postulated that AI would be able to remodel itself and that Man could not control it".... well that shouldn't have taken much brain power to figure - as some might say that our end could've been foretold from the invention of the wheel - others, the industrial revolution - whatever mechanism eased our workload by physical relief - was bound to reach a point when it'd be advanced enough to think for us - so we'd stop thinking for ourselves.....sad really - buts that's where lazy takes you.
And what then - what of reality....as if at that point anything could be simulated then where would our True Reality be...and lets say, we've reached that point before - then where could we be now - in some fictitious matrix - playing a part in a programme, a simulation...or game ?

I found the idea of "Q" in the Star Trek series (next generation) interesting - he was an extra dimensional being, with a wicked sense of humour - was unrestricted by the laws of time/space or physics - and could take a shortcut to everywhere, in one episode he sent Picard to live on a planet for a "Lifetime" - then with a thought - brought him back to his (earlier?) Enterprise reality - the "Time" away a nothing......all Timeless.
I firmly believe in more outside of this seeming short physical existence - but how deep does it go - as the other interesting question Heeler mentioned What if the Universe was always here? - what is always, what is here.....like the idea that a God was always there perhaps ?...that from nothing, to nothing...has no meaning - as if so, and there is and has always been something...then shouldn't we all going somewhere, and the only question that remains to answer is - Where ?

[sinkov]

Tanya Gold on Hawking in the Speccy three years ago.

"Stephen Hawking is a misogynist; and also, quite possibly, a narcissist. You wouldn’t know it from watching The Theory Of Everything, the new biopic from Working Title, in which you are invited only to weep when he discovers he has motor neurone disease at 21, and then marvel at his achievements in physics. It goes wild on the obvious cognitive dissonance of Hawking’s life and work — trapped in his body, yet transported in his mind to the stars.
I cried as Eddie Redmayne — as Hawking — falls, rises and is redeemed with medals too numerous to type; he is very good, but he only goes where the script allows him. But I do not like being manipulated by cinema, unless I know I am being manipulated; and Working Title is usually Steven Spielberg transported to the UK — all sudsy soap and sticky emotion. I am still angry that The Imitation Game, which was supposed to honour the mathematician Alan Turing, managed instead to call him a traitor. It stuck a Soviet spy in his hut, made him blackmail Turing, and he went along with it for fear of being outed as homo***ual; less tribute than fiction.


So I read the book this film was based on. It is a memoir by Jane Wilde, Hawking’s wife of 30 years, and it is called Travelling to Infinity. (‘Infinity’, in this case, means ‘divorce’.) She wrote an earlier, angrier memoir, Music to Move the Stars; but this is now ‘revised’. Hawking too has written a memoir — My Brief History. This would never make a film, because it is too brief. It is almost an absence. So the film-makers turned to Jane for their story. They have used her shoddily.

Jane knew Hawking might not live long when they married in 1965. The original prognosis was two years. Even so, they made a home, they travelled to conferences abroad, they had three children. She abandoned her scholarly ambitions — the medieval lyric poetry of the Iberian peninsula, if you care, and he didn’t — to support his. Her sacrifice deserves thanks, but no thanks came; when he became the youngest fellow of the Royal Society at 32, he made a speech, but he did not mention his wife. And why would he? She had become ‘chauffeur, nurse, valet, cup-bearer, and interpreter, as well as companion wife’; that common ghost that haunts university cities — ‘a physics widow’. (Jane notes that Albert Einstein’s first wife, Mileva, named ‘physics’ as the co-respondent in her divorce proceedings.) In Cambridge in the 1960s, she writes, ‘The role of a wife — and possibly a mother — was a one-way ticket to outer darkness.’ The talents of the women around her had been ‘spurned by a system that refused to acknowledge that wives and mothers might be capable of an intellectual identity of their own’. This is the hinterland in which a disabled man became a master of the universe; and that is why I call Hawking a misogynist. He may be a talented, or even extraordinary, physicist, but he was a very ordinary husband of his own space and time. He repeatedly refused Jane’s requests for more assistance caring for him. Would he have done more for her, if he could? I doubt it.

Jane began to ‘lose her identity’, although she tried not to. She continued her studies; she sang in a choir; she cared for their children. It was essential, she says, not to abandon them for their father, who used his oldest son, Robert, as nurse and helpmeet from the age of nine; she insists that they are a family and no person is more important than another, even if Hawking yearned for ‘a pedestal’ and wanted her to travel everywhere with him, which she would not do, because she would not leave the children. Hawking resented this; why could he not be a king in his family, when strangers — especially after the publication of his bestseller A Brief History of Time in 1988 — were so adoring? Things became worse after he became world-famous, because people believed he had ‘beaten’ motor neurone disease and the family lived without struggle. This denial extended to his own parents, who would not help Jane; any plea for assistance, she writes, was interpreted as ‘disloyalty’.
The cruellest thing was his refusal to discuss his illness. ‘It was,’ she writes, ‘the very lack of communication that was hardest to bear.’ He insisted on ‘a facade of normality’; yet if he could not acknowledge his own suffering — he ‘never’ talked about the illness — how could he acknowledge hers? He was ‘a child possessed of a massive and fractious ego’, surrounded by a growing entourage of acolytes. Husband and wife became ‘master’ and ‘slave’. They famously fought about religion — he is an atheist, she a Christian, but this feels like a proxy argument. It was the illness that had become ‘a barrier of anguish between us’.
Her revenge on her ‘master’, the ‘all-powerful emperor’, was typical of the voiceless, in that it was passive-aggressive and unanswerable; she fell in love with an organist called Jonathan Jones, and invited him, apparently with her husband’s consent, to spend time with the family. (The relationship was, she insists, initially chaste; they are now married.) Hawking responded by further immersing himself in an entourage that worshipped him and reduced his family to ‘second-class’ citizens. He left Jane in February 1990; the next day he telephoned to invite her to be photographed to publicise the film of A Brief History of Time. He married his chief acolyte, his nurse Elaine Mason; later he divorced her.

Early in her book, Jane says Hawking identified with the hero of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, ‘cursed to roam the seas through storm and wind until he could find someone who would sacrifice herself for love of him’. And that was Jane Hawking’s experience of marriage; except she didn’t let herself drown. This is a story about disability and the wounds it cuts, although it is not the story you will see in The Theory of Everything.

I do not write to insult Professor Hawking. I wouldn’t have written this article at all, but Hawking has endorsed The Theory of Everything, so he must like the portrait of himself that it presents — and torn from his own wife’s furious memoir! To call the disabled saintly when they are not is as prejudiced as calling them sinful; and he of all people should know it. A genius Professor Hawking may be — what do I know of physics? — but he was, if you believe his wife, and I do — a very bad husband indeed."

Like I said earlier, a tw@t.

[1959_60]

Wow. I am amazed that you are using Tanya Gold to try to prove your point.

I really don't know about Hawking's private life, but I do know that he was probably the best scientist of our generation.

I don't know who your heroes are, but I bet someone could unearth some dirt on them (Churchill?)

Let's just celebrate his vast achievements which are also a massive source of hope to lots of seriously disabled people.

[blueheeler1]

....as far as the repetitive system is concerned - i guess it'd simply be....birth/school/work/death.

As heeler said on S.H - "he postulated that AI would be able to remodel itself and that Man could not control it".... well that shouldn't have taken much brain power to figure - as some might say that our end could've been foretold from the invention of the wheel - others, the industrial revolution - whatever mechanism eased our workload by physical relief - was bound to reach a point when it'd be advanced enough to think for us - so we'd stop thinking for ourselves.....sad really - buts that's where lazy takes you.
And what then - what of reality....as if at that point anything could be simulated then where would our True Reality be...and lets say, we've reached that point before - then where could we be now - in some fictitious matrix - playing a part in a programme, a simulation...or game ?

I found the idea of "Q" in the Star Trek series (next generation) interesting - he was an extra dimensional being, with a wicked sense of humour - was unrestricted by the laws of time/space or physics - and could take a shortcut to everywhere, in one episode he sent Picard to live on a planet for a "Lifetime" - then with a thought - brought him back to his (earlier?) Enterprise reality - the "Time" away a nothing......all Timeless.
I firmly believe in more outside of this seeming short physical existence - but how deep does it go - as the other interesting question Heeler mentioned What if the Universe was always here? - what is always, what is here.....like the idea that a God was always there perhaps ?...that from nothing, to nothing...has no meaning - as if so, and there is and has always been something...then shouldn't we all going somewhere, and the only question that remains to answer is - Where ?

The Big Bang (if that was the point of creation of all the planets in the Universe--or even the Universe itself some think) apparently occurred around 13 Billion years ago.

We were not around at that time; we had no form and no consciousness.

We were "dead" in that sense. We were not aware we were dead.

Now we are alive and for many of us a combination of ego and indoctrination does not let us conceive that life is final at death.

We want to cling to unproven and unsubstantiated belief that our intellect is so great that we must have some presence after life. We believe something must have given us this intellect and that it could not have been as a result of evolution and pure luck resulting in the five mass extinctions our Earth has experienced so far.

After-life was made popular in early religious control that whist our lives were miserable on this earth there would be reward in heaven.

It would be great if this belief had legs and even greater if Mankind was kind to its own and other species whilst on this planet.

The fact is we are the most destructful life form on Earth.

Animals at least kill to eat.

So we take this most destructful, deceitful, pityless, life form and give it life after death.

Why not.

[Norder]

The Big Bang (if that was the point of creation of all the planets in the Universe--or even the Universe itself some think) apparently occurred around 13 Billion years ago.
We were not around at that time; we had no form and no consciousness.
We were "dead" in that sense. We were not aware we were dead.
Now we are alive and for many of us a combination of ego and indoctrination does not let us conceive that life is final at death.
We want to cling to unproven and unsubstantiated belief that our intellect is so great that we must have some presence after life. We believe something must have given us this intellect and that it could not have been as a result of evolution and pure luck resulting in the five mass extinctions our Earth has experienced so far.
After-life was made popular in early religious control that whist our lives were miserable on this earth there would be reward in heaven.
It would be great if this belief had legs and even greater if Mankind was kind to its own and other species whilst on this planet.
The fact is we are the most destructful life form on Earth.
Animals at least kill to eat.
So we take this most destructful, deceitful, pityless, life form and give it life after death.
Why not.

....I think the so called big bang began around 80yrs ago heeler - but that religion (as taught as fact in schools) has since been replaced by another - an expanding vacuum of energy....causing that later hot dense state - but that could all change.




and anyway - I dont honestly know who or what was around then.....and it doesn't much concern me - but I do know something of my beginning to present...in the here and now - and can assure you that I haven't gone into some deep hypnotic regressive state - like those that do.....to discover they'd been Cleopatra's chief food tester etc.....and I dont follow any organised religion (to bind oneself) to some deviant perv of a Pope or historic bloodsoaked battles under the cross etc.
However - there's many that do follow and worship - but I think that if they're loving, caring and sincere folk who know their own minds - then who am I to object.....just as I wouldn't have shown any disapproval to the ancient Aboriginals....for many millenia they had had their dreamtime - and their eternal creator - then along came the missionaries, but instead of learning from them - the smashed their ladder tree with the modern system of institutional belief - an attempt perhaps....to severe a more perfect link to the heavens ?

Cheers.