Stephen Hawking Review
Monday night, I had the opportunity to see Stephen Hawking speak, I hate to say this but I found it kind of boring. I mean, if you don’t know who he is, it was like holy cow that is incredible, but if you know who he is, it wasn’t anything special. I guess the normal switch he uses to control his computer and speech synthesizer was acting up, so instead of the talks he was going to do, which was his Brief History of Time talk and live Q&A, he did was two lectures instead.
I don’t recall what the first talk was named, but it ended up being all about himself. Like I said above, if you didn’t know about him, you were more or less blown away. He talked about how his disability came about, and how he got into the field that he is in. He went onto bash the two or three other professors that didn’t allow him to study under him during his various degrees, and was glad it seemed that their ideas wound up to nothing. The last twenty or so minutes was about what he basically is studying now. I have been reading Stephen Hawking’s work on and off since eighth or ninth grade, so a majority of the lecture I kind of tuned out.
The second lecture, was looking at history, but in reverse. A critical review of this lecture could be that he was just pushing the Big Bang Theory. I can’t really give my view of this lecture because between still being partially zoned out from the first lecture, and just generally tired from the day. But he started from roughly present day, and went to the dawn of time, explaining how matter came about. For this section, Dr. Hawking used the analogy of matter being formed like bubbles raising to the surface like in soda. When they pop, they create matter.
I told somebody earlier that I was glad that the ticket I was given was free, because it was not stimulating to me at all really. I mean the last bit of the first lecture was a nice refresher, but that is all. I was little bummed at the night, I expected to be foaming at the mouth as I walked out.
For those that do not know who Stephen Hawking is, check out his Wikipedia entry or his personal webpage.
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