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January 7th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
By
Michael Hanlon
Last updated at 11:01 PM on 6th January 2012
Birthday portrait: Prof Hawking in his office at University of Cambridge as he prepares to celebrate his 70th on Sunday
It is easy to be suspicious of media scientists, the researchers who seem to crave the limelight as much as the laboratory. There are one or two I can think of who are downright dodgy. But the majority who have been simply blessed with enough communication skills to bring the world of the otherwise incomprehensible to the attention of the great unwashed.
I always wondered about Stephen Hawking. Here was a man whose disability seemed to overshadow everything else about him. A brain on wheels, voice-synthesiser at the ready to supply an apposite quote or aphorism. Having never interviewed Prof Hawking to judge for myself I asked a friend, an extremely eminent (but extremely non-media) scientist who moves in his circles for his opinion. “Oh, he’s the real deal,” I was told. ‘World-class researcher, top of his game.’
Hawking turned 70 this week, a cosmic achievement in itself for a man who was told he would be dead by the age of 23. In the history of people who have managed to convey something of the sheer, magisterial oddity of the universe find ourselves in, Hawking takes a place at the top table, along with Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Paul Davies and Hawking’s Cambridge colleague Martin Rees, a brilliant scientist and explainer who deserves much more limelight than he gets.
Hawking is one of the people who has made cosmology and fundamental physics perhaps the hottest area of science at the moment. In his book ‘A Brief History of Time’, published 24 years ago, he asked the seminal ‘Life the Universe and everything’ questions: Why are we here? What is the Universe and how did it begin? How will it end? Is this the only way things can be?
The book was a popularised précis of Hawking’s life work to date, which charts the wildest shores of physics. Hawking did not invent the term ‘black hole’ but he has done as much as anyone to define and describe the properties of these cosmic monsters. Hawking has addressed the problem of what happens to physical information – the properties of a material – when it is gobbled by the gravitational singularity at the heart of a Hole. Does it simply disappear from the Universe? Or is it slowly re-radiated back as heat? Hawking originally though the information vanished but then changed his mind.
Genius: Hawking has helped make cosmology and fundamental physics perhaps the hottest area of current science
He asked what happens if a pair of quantum ‘entangled’ particles appear on either side of Checkpoint Charlie on the event horizon of a black hole? Thanks to Hawking we now believe that black holes, once thought to be immortal, slowly disappear, even the biggest vanishing in a puff of photons in countless billions of years.
Hawking has asked questions about the beginning of time and the end, and has supplied some answers although a ‘theory of everything’ (the term used rather vaguely to describe a synthesis of quantum and relativistic descriptions of the Universe) remains as distant a prospect as it did back in 198, when he predicted it was in reach.
Inevitably, we tend to concentrate on Hawking the man, rather than Hawking’s science. So much about him is at odds with what we imagine an otherworldly physicist to be, let alone one who is profoundly disabled. This alpha male likes fast cars and he likes women, although in an interview in New Scientist last week he admitted that the female sex is one thing in the Universe which still baffles him.
There have been two failed marriages, family fallouts and a long-standing rumour that Prof Hawking suffered physical abuse at the hand so his second wife, he former nurse, something he has always denied. This is not the life of an ascetic scientific monk.
Then there are the pronouncements. We should be wary of alien contact. The laws of physics preclude the existence of God. Hawking is a genius but like all geniuses when he strays into territory that is not his own he is rendered as mortal as the rest of us. Physicists have as much to say about God (or aliens) as anyone else, but no more perhaps.
Allegations: There are rumours that Stephen Hawking was abused by second wife Elaine – something he denies
Art and science: The above photograph is part of a show entitled ‘Stephen Hawking: A 70th birthday celebration’ at the Science Museum in London
To assess the value of Stephen Hawking we would perhaps best imagine what the world would be like without him. Science would lose one of its most charismatic stars, for a start, and for that we would all be a bit poorer. Hawking has made esoteric thinking fashionable; he is a public philosopher of the old sort as much as a scientist. Like Richard Feynman, the American quantum physicist who played the bongo drums, drank in lap dancing clubs and was semi-obsessed with Tuvan throat-singing, Hawking has brought a peculiar charisma to the world of the photon and the electron.
You do not have to understand his equations to realize that Hawking’s Universe is a very strange and wonderful place indeed. Thanks to him and the other cosmologists we now know that the cosmos we live in is more like Alice’s Wonderland than the clockwork and billiard balls of Newton. Does all of this matter? Yes. Understanding the Big Bang will not save any lives or make money, but science is one of the defining – perhaps THE defining – properties of Western Civilization, its crowning glory. Long may he continue to dazzle us.
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