ADSactly Homage - RIP Stephen Hawking

One of the biggest minds of our times has passed away on March 14th. The world's combined IQ dropped by staggering 160 points. Not only his intelligence - a true force of nature - was impressive, but also the whole man, his focus, his life.

There is a saying associated to Voltaire:

"Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers."

Stephen Hawking knew how to ask the right questions. Some of us may remember where knowing an answer of which the question was forgotten leads to. The number 42 comes to mind for some. (For those who are not familiar with Douglas Adams "The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy": The Supercomputer "Deep Thought" gave this answer, after being asked the answer on Life, the Universe, and Everything)

Another big mind, Albert Einstein once phrased this task with following words:

"If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask… for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes."

This sums up the life of Stephen Hawking in an impressive way. He was constantly living his life under this kind of time pressure, never knowing if and when it could be at an end, so he had to perfect his way of asking proper questions.
If you have some time, I strongly suggest watching Stephen Hawking asking the proper questions and giving answers to them, as clear and bold as only few other man were capable of. (Find a link to his infamous TED talk here)

Some Private Coincidential Background History

Only 2 weeks ago I decided to buy and read some of the books by Stephen Hawking. Because it has become a habit of mine, to regularly fill the holes in my education, since I found the Steem platform.

After reading the first few chapters, I was already impressed by the ease Hawkings was able to find words explaining the most complex of matters. It would be proposterous to claim, that I was able to grasp every idea he was discussing, but still I was able to follow his thoughts.

Until Sunday, I had no time to continue reading, but was reminded of it in the strangest way:

I was travelling home from a visit to my parents, when I spotted a bird of prey sitting on the guardrail during a minor traffic jam. I tried to take a picture with my phone, thinking about what kind of bird this could be. I wasn't sure if it was a falcon or a hawk.
Later at home, the picture I took turned out to be garbage, the bird was completely blurred, almost transcendend: A falcon... maybe the king of hawks - the Hawk-king was almost gone! I thought to myself that I really have to return to reading that book. Only two days later Stephen Hawking died.

Back To Stephen Hawking:

There is not much need for digging in the past to find out facts about Stephen Hawking. There is Wikipedia and there are hundreds of articles posted about him since his death on March 14th - and surely even more before that.

But there is something we can do - we can try to do what he did:

Think

I think noone ever came closer to the answer to the question:

What if there is nothing left of you, but your mind?

If I imagine being locked in a constricted and limited body with an unfathomable powerful mind, then I have to realize that this is in fact the case - for each of us calling ourselves human: Our bodies may be limited, but our minds are unlimited (no matter how stupid we are at times), only less extremely than in the case of Stephen Hawking. There is soo much going on in our heads, that we hardly are able to get it straight for ourselves and even less for our fellow humans. If we learn to overcome our limitations, we learn what it really means to be human.

What can we learn from his life?

He learned about his disease at the age of 21, he was told he had only a few years left at best. He lived for another 55 years, became a husband, a father, a grandfather, a bestselling author, all while loosing his ability to walk and to speak. He still managed to find ways to be heard, to get along, to be useful and even held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009, the probably most prestigious "chair" in sience, that once was held by Isaac Newton. Why he succeded? He never ever he gave up despite all his limitations!

Try, Fail, Adjust, Repeat!

Thank you Stephen, for giving us a glimpse of how we could live our lives, and even if you didn't believe that there is anything after death, I like the idea and the belief that you are now in a less limited condition and able to see one of the few things that have been denied to you:

Seeing the world from the outside, being in space, perhaps finding the answer to so many questions, you have well phrased and thought about.

Rest In Peace!

Let us remain silent for a while and listen to the mastermind, whose words even found their way into modern pop music: Pink Floyd "Keep talking" (2009)

Thank you for reading!

@pollux.one

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