Stephen Hawking Dies at 76

[Bryan Moore]

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-43396008

Not much I'm going to say here that the link doesn't say...

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

That is a man who lived.

[Graham Kennedy]

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

I hope posting this is all right...

[Bryan Moore]

I first tried to read "A Brief History of Time" when I was about 14, and it was largely above my head. Over the years, though, it became one of my most returned-to books. Some time in high school I ended up getting the audio book, narrated by a proper-sounding British gentleman by the name of Michael Jackson. I can't tell you how many nights I fell asleep listening to pieces of that.

[Bryan Moore]

I know he won't lay in state... but damn... let him lay in state!

[Mikey]

I didn't know until looking at some of the news articles about his passing that he was, in fact, Sir Stephen Hawking, but I'm glad of it. There's little way to describe the impact that A Brief History of Time had on a 15-year-old Mikey, and how it really brought the world of astrophysics to the masses. He was truly the first to commit to the idea that the search for the GUT - and detailed astrophysics in general - weren't an alchemy to be jealously guarded by the elite few initiates, expanding greatly on the far more vague and shallow attempts by Carl Sagan and setting the stage for men like Neil DeGrasse-Tyson. RIP.

[Bryan Moore]

I cannot find the quote, but one of my favorite opinions of the man was one that was said by someone years ago that not only was Stephen Hawking not the smartest man in the world, but also likely not the smartest man in his department at Cambridge, but that no man made advanced science seem so accessible to the masses as Hawking, not even Sagan (Degrasse-Tyson not really in the picture at the time).