Stephen Hawking passes

Probably the most famous theoretical physicist and ALS victim of our time has passed according to Stars & Stripes. Stephen Hawking lived an astounding 50 years after his diagnosis with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS – Lou Gehrig disease as it’s known in the US) in 1969. Many patients last only several months after the diagnosis.

A severe attack of pneumonia in 1985 left him breathing through a tube, forcing him to communicate through an electronic voice synthesizer that gave him his distinctive robotic monotone.

But he continued his scientific work, appeared on television and married for a second time.

As one of Isaac Newton’s successors as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Hawking was involved in the search for the great goal of physics — a “unified theory.”

Such a theory would resolve the contradictions between Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which describes the laws of gravity that govern the motion of large objects like planets, and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics, which deals with the world of subatomic particles.

For Hawking, the search was almost a religious quest — he said finding a “theory of everything” would allow mankind to “know the mind of God.”

“A complete, consistent unified theory is only the first step: our goal is a complete understanding of the events around us, and of our own existence,” he wrote in “A Brief History of Time.”

In later years, though, he suggested a unified theory might not exist.

The ALS Association says that veterans are twice as likely to be afflicted with ALS as their civilian peers. There hasn’t been an official reason to the cause, but ALS is a presumptive condition for veterans as far as the VA is concerned, meaning that they’ll take care of most of your needs. Since most people don’t show signs of ALS until they are more than 50 years old, it’s nice to know that the VA will be there for you if you need help.

But, as far as Mr Hawkins is concerned, I’ll take 76 years old.

Category: Who knows