Stephen Hawking has now "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to touch the face of....truth.

Courtesy of the New York Times: 

Stephen W. Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist and best-selling author who roamed the cosmos from a wheelchair, pondering the nature of gravity and the origin of the universe and becoming an emblem of human determination and curiosity, died early Wednesday at his home in Cambridge, England. He was 76. 

His death was confirmed by a spokesman for Cambridge University. 

“Not since Albert Einstein has a scientist so captured the public imagination and endeared himself to tens of millions of people around the world,” Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York, said in an interview. 

Dr. Hawking did that largely through his book “A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes,” published in 1988. It has sold more than 10 million copies and inspired a documentary film by Errol Morris. The 2014 film about his life, “The Theory of Everything,” was nominated for several Academy Awards and Eddie Redmayne, who played Dr. Hawking, won the Oscar for best actor. 

Scientifically, Dr. Hawking will be best remembered for a discovery so strange that it might be expressed in the form of a Zen koan: When is a black hole not black? When it explodes.

By any measure Stephen Hawking was an absolutely amazing human being.

And in fact a living lesson as to just what can be achieved by humanity itself once it steps away from superstition and fully embraces the miracles to be discovered by scientific exploration.

The challenges that Hawking faced in his life were the kind that would destroy most people, and yet he managed to not only adapt, but to overcome.

It kind of puts the challenges that most of us face into perspective doesn't it?

Remembering Stephen Hawking, a renowned physicist and ambassador of science. His theories unlocked a universe of possibilities that we & the world are exploring. May you keep flying like superman in microgravity, as you said to astronauts on @Space_Station in 2014 pic.twitter.com/FeR4fd2zZ5

— NASA (@NASA) March 14, 2018

His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake. But it's not empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric of spacetime that defies measure. Stephen Hawking, RIP 1942-2018. pic.twitter.com/nAanMySqkt

— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) March 14, 2018

Have fun out there among the stars. pic.twitter.com/S285MTwGtp

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 14, 2018

I would say RIP, that would be an insult to the memory of this great man.

Stephen Hawking says that in less than 600 years this planet will be virtually uninhabitable.

Get out while you still can.

Courtesy of Yahoo: 

British physicist Stephen Hawking has warned repeatedly that Earth could well be doomed, but his latest warning gives us no more than 583 years before we get burned on Earth. 

During a video clip aired at the Tencent WE Summit on Sunday, the 75-year-old scientist said that humanity would have to deal with exponential growth in the centuries ahead. He noted that the world’s population has been doubling every 40 years. 

“This exponential growth cannot continue into the next millennium,” Hawking, who has been coping with neurodegenerative disease for decades, said in his computer-synthesized voice. “By the year 2600, the world’s population would be standing shoulder to shoulder, and the electricity consumption would make the Earth glow red-hot. 

“This is untenable,” Hawking said as a planet-sized ball of fire blazed on the screen.

Hawking suggested that humanity's best chance for survival lay in the stars, and that finding other inhabitable planets may be our only hope.

Personally I am all for space exploration and have believed for decades that it is our destiny to someday leave this planet and explore the cosmos.

However 583 years is actually cutting it a little close.

If you consider the fact that we have yet to understand how to travel any great distance from this planet and survive, while adding to that the fact we have yet to identify a planet that we know for certain can sustain life, then just for fun let's remember that also need to be able to move not a handful, but potentially millions of people, and it's starting to feel a little doomy around here.

Of course we could all just stop having so many damn babies, quickly move to renewable energy resources, and start working together to repair this planet that we have all treated like our own personal landfill for thousands of years.

Nope, our best hope is to get the hell out of Dodge before the planet burns to a crisp.

Scientific genius Stephen Hawking says he does not feel welcome in Donald Trump's America.

Courtesy of Newsweek: 

Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s leading scientists, has said he no longer feels welcome in the United States under Donald Trump’s administration. 

“I would like to visit again and to talk to other scientists, but I fear that I may not be welcome,” Hawking said Monday in an interview on U.K. TV show Good Morning Britain. 

“Trump was elected by people who felt disenfranchised by the governing elite in a revolt against globalization,” he added. 

“His priority will be to satisfy his electorate, who are neither liberal nor that well informed.”

That last line is dead on.

I can't say that I blame Hawking for his attitude, there are certainly times I don't feel welcome here either, however it is incredibly upsetting to learn that people outside of this country now view it in such a negative light.

The history of America is as a place that welcomes scientific progress and those who make that progress possible.

At least that USED to be our history.

The presidency of Donald Trump is damaging America in ways that it may take us decades to completely understand.

The Donald Trump campaign is such an aberration that even one of the smartest men on the planet cannot understand it.

Courtesy of CNN:  

As one of the world's most renowned scientists, Stephen Hawking is regularly called on to help explain the universe's more mysterious phenomena. 

But asked to account for Donald Trump's political rise Tuesday, the British theoretical physicist was stumped. 

"I can't," Hawking told CNN affiliate ITV's "Good Morning Britain" program. 

"He is a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator."

Stephen Hawking has the kind of intellect that works through several complicated mathematical equations before breakfast, and who has helped human kind to gain an understanding of the universe that that we never had before, and yet he is completely unable to explain how a creature like Donald Trump could win the GOP nomination for President.

Well I think the answer is simply that there are a vast number of Americans who cannot even spell the word "equation" much less solve one, and whose understanding of the universe is contained in a book written a few thousand years ago by superstitious desert dwellers.

People like that are easily manipulated into believing just about anything, even that an arrogant egomaniac would ever put the needs of the country or the American people before his own all encompassing need for wealth and power.

The problem with Stephen Hawking is that he is so smart he simply cannot fathom the stupidity of the conservative American voter.

Science had a pretty good week last week.

If image does not expand click here.

And gee none of this required any prayer whatsoever.

Stephen Hawking announces project to use 100 million dollars in search for alien life.

Courtesy of The Washington Post: 

On Monday, famed physicist Stephen Hawking and Russian tycoon Yuri Milner held a news conference in London to announce their new project: injecting $100 million and a whole lot of brain power into the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life, an endeavor they're calling Breakthrough Listen. 

"We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," Hawking said at Monday's news conference, "So in an infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life."

Okay while the skeptic inside of me wonders if this one hundred million would not be better spent on education, or feeding the poor, or fighting climate change the twelve year old boy inside of me has a prepubescent chubby at the very thought of discovering life out in space.

I don't think I mention it very often, but on my bucket list is to be around long enough to witness the discovery of life on other planets.

It seems more than logical that it must exist, so all we have to do is locate a few space amoebas and I can die a happy man.  (Well actually it will take a bit more to die completely happy but trust me you don't want to hear about that.)

Never has the difference between Creationism and Evolution been explained quite so well.

And there you have it.

In the least surprising news of the day Stephen Hawking has come out as an Atheist.

Courtesy of Raw Story:  

Stephen Hawking clarified this week that he was an atheist because science had provided him with a “more convincing” explanation of the origins of the universe. 

According to NBC News, Hawking made the comments to the Spanish-language paper El Mundo during the Starmus Festival at Tenerife in the Canary Islands. 

El Mundo’s Pablo Jauregui pointed out that Hawking had written in his book “A Brief History of Time” that scientists could “know the mind of God” if a unifying set of principles — or theory of everything — was discovered to explain the physical universe. But Hawking later wrote in “The Grand Design” that God was no longer necessary because science had provided a better understanding of the universe. 

“Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe,” the world-famous theoretical physicist told Jauregui. “But now science offers a more convincing explanation.” 

“What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t,” he added. “I’m an atheist.”

However Hawking DOES believe that we are not alone in the universe.

“The idea that we are alone in the universe seems to me completely implausible and arrogant,” Hawking told the paper. “Considering the number of planets and stars that we know exist, it’s extremely unlikely that we are the only form of evolved life.”

I am in total agreement with both of these statements. 

I have to say however that I have been counting Hawking as an Atheist for some time now, and am a little surprised that it took him this long to make it official.

Could have a little something to do with the fact that people generally have a lower opinion of Atheists than they do child molesters, rapists, and pond scum.

Stephen Hawking on the afterlife.

"I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first," he said. 

"I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark," he added.

I sometimes find myself struck silent by the musings of seemingly intelligent people about the possibilities of an afterlife.

I think the realization that such a thing was not possible occurred to me quite young, and my research and musings since have only reinforced the obviousness of that realization.

Our consciousness is really only a collection of our memories and experiences, that are contained within the computer housed within our skulls.

Once that amazing machine is rendered inoperable our memories, our consciousness, our soul if you will, are also gone forever.

This would seem as obvious as the realization that once the heart stops pumping blood our bodies no longer function, and yet the opposite is held so dear by so many of us that to suggest the lack of a life following this is considered heretical even by many of those who consider themselves non-religious. 

I often think of it in terms of a USB flash drive.

Though it may be fairly bulging with documents, and pictures, and video of a person's life, if there are no more computers left to read the information it essentially does not exist. And it is as if the life contained within was never lived.

That is why I always stress the importance of experiencing all this life has to offer. Rather than mourn the loss of eternity, instead we should embrace and squeeze joy out of the one life that we have.

Every kiss should be savored, every laugh echoed by our own, and every moment of pain respected for the lesson that it teaches.

In that way we will touch the lives of those around us in a fashion which carries some small part of us forward. And as they touch the lives of others as well, perhaps our brief life will have an impact that lives past our final breath.

(Source)

Just a suggestion, but if you are going to attack a scientist for being an Atheist, you might want to get your scientists straight first.

I leave you with the tweet of the year..."Dumb athiest. Why quote @richarddawkins? He just a retard in a wheelchair with a robot voice"

— Ricky Gervais (@rickygervais) May 18, 2013

Personally I am troubled that Richard Dawkins seems to have absconded with Stephen Hawking's wheelchair as well as his computer based communication system.

That seems unnecessarily rude to me.

P.S. By the way Ricky Gervais loves to rattle the cages of some of his more ignorant critics on Twitter and often retweets some of the most ridiculous things you have ever heard. This one was particularly funny.