Post by Icefanatic on Mar 14, 2018 8:49:59 GMT -5
Stephen Hawking (January 08, 1942 – March 14, 2018) - Born on Sir Isaac Newton's birthday and died on Albert Einstein's.
Not much I can say about the man that hasn't been said elsewhere, and better, except for what he meant to me.
In the summer of 1990 I was browsing through some paperbacks looking for something to read. One book caught my eye, but it wasn't a tome of fiction like I had been looking for, but something else...
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, the title proclaimed. I gave it a thumb-through. It was in trade format, not mass-market, which mean it cost twice as much as what I had been expecting to pay for something to read. And it was non-fiction. I gave it a second thumb-through. It looked like a textbook trying to pass itself off as something ordinary people might want to read. As I read the reviews and the description, I was intrigued. I'd always been a bit of a science geek at heart, but did I really want to spend my money on this over the latest Stephen King novel?
Well, I bought it. And read it. And read it again. Over and over. It was fascinating to me, and fundamentally changed how I thought and how I saw the world. I decided to take AP Physics, and after acing the course seriously considered a career as a physicist. Along the way I realized as much as I loved the concepts of theoretical physics, I hated the mathematical equations in an inverse and proportionate manner.
My life as a would-be proto-Leonard Hofstadter was over before it could begin. But physics has remained a lifelong interest for me, if not a career; and that all started for me thanks to Stephen Hawking's book almost three decades ago.
Never had the chance to thank him in person, hope this post will do...
Not much I can say about the man that hasn't been said elsewhere, and better, except for what he meant to me.
In the summer of 1990 I was browsing through some paperbacks looking for something to read. One book caught my eye, but it wasn't a tome of fiction like I had been looking for, but something else...
A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, the title proclaimed. I gave it a thumb-through. It was in trade format, not mass-market, which mean it cost twice as much as what I had been expecting to pay for something to read. And it was non-fiction. I gave it a second thumb-through. It looked like a textbook trying to pass itself off as something ordinary people might want to read. As I read the reviews and the description, I was intrigued. I'd always been a bit of a science geek at heart, but did I really want to spend my money on this over the latest Stephen King novel?
Well, I bought it. And read it. And read it again. Over and over. It was fascinating to me, and fundamentally changed how I thought and how I saw the world. I decided to take AP Physics, and after acing the course seriously considered a career as a physicist. Along the way I realized as much as I loved the concepts of theoretical physics, I hated the mathematical equations in an inverse and proportionate manner.
My life as a would-be proto-Leonard Hofstadter was over before it could begin. But physics has remained a lifelong interest for me, if not a career; and that all started for me thanks to Stephen Hawking's book almost three decades ago.
Never had the chance to thank him in person, hope this post will do...
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