I kinda think he would have liked that.
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RIP Stephen Hawking
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Originally posted by MsD View PostJohn Humphreys asked Brian Cox whether Prof Hawking was “cut some slack” due to his disability.
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setting the bar for Scientific great as being the person who says "Everything you understand about physics, is just a special case of this wider set of underlying rules" is setting it a wee bit high. That only happens once in a while, and is a much a reflection on the wider state of science than anything else. We might have arrived at Newton's theories a lot sooner, if more than six people in the world could read and only two of them were in communication with each other, and you couldn't fit all scientific and mathematical knowledge into a single book.
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Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View Postsetting the bar for Scientific great as being the person who says "Everything you understand about physics, is just a special case of this wider set of underlying rules" is setting it a wee bit high.
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Originally posted by Ray de Galles View PostAs such, I'm never comfortable with a term so rooted in the religious concept of the afterlife as 'Rest in Peace/RIP' being used on their death.
I suppose Hawking would say that in the nothingness he expected, he will indeed RIP, no harm done. And if he turned out to be wrong about the afterlife bit, he might say: "Ooof, yeah, thanks. Turns out, I needed those well-wishes."
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Puzzled by the RIP thing. It's just a universally understood expression of sentiment towards someone recently died isn't it? I mean atheists (of whom I count myself one) generally have no problem with bless you for sneezes, (good)bye, Happy Christmas, Easter eggs, cussing connected with hell or damn... Culturally, there's a whole lot of everyday English that originated in a more pious past.
Edit - G-Man would it only be religious Austrians who'd say grüß Gott?
It's not a hill I'd die on, but seems an odd quibble.Last edited by ChrisJ; 14-03-2018, 21:09.
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Rest in peace is apparently papist superstition.
My point about hawking, einstein and newton is that you can't make revealing the next layer of the physics onion the test of whether someone is a scientific great. that sort of event comes along every couple of hundred years. People think he's a great primarily because he was able to apply General relativity theory to cosmology. Everyone was very impressed.
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Originally posted by G-Man View PostI suppose Hawking would say that in the nothingness he expected, he will indeed RIP, no harm done. And if he turned out to be wrong about the afterlife bit, he might say: "Ooof, yeah, thanks. Turns out, I needed those well-wishes."
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Originally posted by ChrisJ View PostPuzzled by the RIP thing. It's just a universally understood expression of sentiment towards someone recently died isn't it? I mean atheists (of whom I count myself one) generally have no problem with bless you for sneezes, (good)bye, Happy Christmas, Easter eggs, cussing connected with hell or damn... Culturally, there's a whole lot of everyday English that originated in a more pious past.
Edit - G-Man would it only be religious Austrians who'd say grüß Gott?
It's not a hill I'd die on, but seems an odd quibble.
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Originally posted by blameless View PostHe outlived his diagnosis by over 50 years which seems like a good innings. <doffs hat >
Absolutely this. I'm gutted at the loss of a great human being (even more than great scientist), but the knowledge that he lived to his mid-70s when he wasn't even expected to make his mid-20s is a nice thought to hang on to.
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Originally posted by Snake Plissken View Post
It's such a strange thing to say about someone whose existence in this world was so fragile he shouldn't by most reckonings have lived past his mid-20s, yet Stephen Hawking's sudden departure feels quite shocking: he seemed oddly immortal. Perhaps it was a subliminal effect of always seeing him wired up to so much hardware, as though he actually (as the jokes in his Futurama, Comic Relief etc appearances had it) were some sort of cyborg, but having sailed a half-century and more past his initial prognosis with his mind still reaching onward out into the cosmos, it felt like he ought to live forever.
It's that for someone so withdrawn, physiologically, into his own body, he was so present: not just an utterly distinctive voice, but one he readily lent to speaking out on all manner of subjects both scientific and humane, from the environment to human spaceflight to the NHS. It's only last week that the new Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series started featuring him as the voice of the Guide mk.II, something that seemed so perfectly apt it's amazing it hadn't happened decades ago.
He will certainly be missed as a communicator as much as a scientist: his ability to synthesise (no pun intended) vast and mindbendingly complex subjects with clarity and a certain grace was extraordinary, both in terms of how he could marshal it all mentally without being able to actually 'do' the science in a conventional sense, and in terms of how he put things across to the layman. I haven't read my copy of A Brief History of Time since the other side of the millennium (it's a lovely '10th Anniversary' hardback edition from 1998) but today's sad news has only reminded me that I really must get around to it again.
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It's such a strange thing to say about someone whose existence in this world was so fragile he shouldn't by most reckonings have lived past his mid-20s, yet Stephen Hawking's sudden departure feels quite shocking: he seemed oddly immortal. Perhaps it was a subliminal effect of always seeing him wired up to so much hardware, as though he actually (as the jokes in his Futurama, Comic Relief etc appearances had it) were some sort of cyborg, but having sailed a half-century and more past his initial prognosis with his mind still reaching onward out into the cosmos, it felt like he ought to live forever.
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Originally posted by G-Man View PostYeah, when used by atheists, I suppose it's a bit of a quaint turn of phrase. On the same level as "I'm blessed" (or, indeed, saying "bless you" to somebody who has sneezed).
I suppose Hawking would say that in the nothingness he expected, he will indeed RIP, no harm done. And if he turned out to be wrong about the afterlife bit, he might say: "Ooof, yeah, thanks. Turns out, I needed those well-wishes."
I know if it were used about me I’d be annoyed, though obviously I’d then be dead, plunged in to everlasting nothingness and have no way of knowing. I’d be similarly fucked off by anyone telling my they were praying for me before death, mind.Last edited by Ray de Galles; 15-03-2018, 03:37.
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Originally posted by ChrisJ View PostG-Man would it only be religious Austrians who'd say grüß Gott?
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Originally posted by G-Man View PostIt's a standard greeting, also in southern Germany, especially southern Bavaria and including Munich, and in German-speaking Switzerland. In many places it has been compacted to "Gruezi" (Bavaria) or "Grützi" (Switzerland).
So long as they don’t say it to Ray. <smiley thing >
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Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!! View PostMy point about hawking, einstein and newton is that you can't make revealing the next layer of the physics onion the test of whether someone is a scientific great. that sort of event comes along every couple of hundred years. People think he's a great primarily because he was able to apply General relativity theory to cosmology. Everyone was very impressed.
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oh god no, quite the opposite. I mean my point is entirely the opposite. His achievement was extraordinary, and downplaying it because it lacked the historical public impact of newtonian physics or the theory of general relativity is to punish him for having been born in the mid 20th century.
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Ah, that makes more sense. I was struggling with the concept of great scientific discoveries and inventions being down to Buggins' turn, and was pretty sure you didn't mean that without being able to see what you did mean. Agree entirely with you, Hawking was a colossus of science who stood easily alongside the likes of Newton and Einstein.
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yeah, if you turned up to some grove of academe with the answers to three Hilbert question, no-one is going to say a) what took you 116 years and b) well half the serious mathematicians in the world have pissed away a ridiculous amount of their time on this, someone was bound to get there eventually. They would immediately worship you as a fucking god. They'd do that if you solved one.
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