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During the 1973-74 academic year, Hawking was a visiting professor at Caltech, and I was a junior in the physics program. The first signs something was up were
by lesterbuck 18y ago
During the 1973-74 academic year, Hawking was a visiting professor at Caltech, and I was a junior in the physics program. The first signs something was up were the wheelchair ramps that appeared around Bridge Laboratory, the older physics building. Hawking made his debut by giving the weekly physics colloquium talk in the large lecture room. At that time, he could still speak well enough to give a lecture in his own voice (with a microphone), and he started into some brand new, mind boggling stuff about black holes evaporating. The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row, and half way through, he asks a question. It was the kind of question that reveals he was following along just fine. The two titans proceeded to have a back and forth exchange for a few minutes in front of the assembled masses, and then Hawking continued with his talk. It was awesome and humbling to witness that, and my friends and I, sitting way up in the back rows, just shook our heads.
- ErrantX 18y agoI am jealous. That must have been a fantastic exchange to witness! I have always enjoyed the ease with which Hawking talks about these complex theories - he does it so well.
- LogicHoleFlaw 18y agoWho do I need to listen to, and where do I need to be, to have this sort of story 30 years from now?
- Allocator2008 18y agoTry MIT. Alan Guth and Max Tegmark are both there. Guth being the father of inflationary cosmology, and Tegmark a noted cosmologist in his own right but also known for his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis (MUH).
- carterschonwald 18y agoI've been told by some folks who've interacted with Tegmark that some of those papers are really just elaborate pranks on his part to create radically implausible but logically consistent models, or something to that extent
- mhartl 18y agoCaltech is still a good bet. A few years ago I sat next to Hawking at Kip Thorne's 60th birthday party. Even more fun was being seated at the dinner table with Hawking's nurses, who told more than one story I'm not at liberty to repeat on Hacker News. ;-)
- nostrademons 18y agoGoogle? YCombinator?
- Scriptor 18y ago"The entire physics faculty was there, and I sensed he had zoomed over most their heads. Most, but not all. Feynman was sitting in the front row" Simply the sheer awesomeness (for lack of more eloquent words) of this sort of meeting between the titans actually sent chills down my spine.
- mark_h 18y agoAbsolutely! My favourite bit from "A Beautiful Mind" -- the book -- is still that early chapter describing what an astonishing collection of intelligence Princeton had attracted at that point time (1930s): Einstein, Goedel, von Neumann, Church, Fine,... The pressure was so intense that the average completion time for a PhD was 2 years! (And when he arrived, Nash himself was apparently just bitter about not being offered a scholarship by Harvard).
- jimbokun 18y agoAny possibility that the exchange was recorded in some way? Easy to forgot how recent it is that any talk or lecture is likely to have been video recorded and already available on the web somewhere.
- rudyfink 18y agoI'd try calling the library ( http://library.caltech.edu/about/contactus.php http://library.caltech.edu/about/contactus.php ), giving the subject and date information, and asking where you might start looking. You are going to be fighting an uphill battle against the odds (probably any recording has been lost or destroyed), but it is within the realm of probability.
- kbhangui 18y agoI have chills down my spine too :D
- mroman 18y agoA great privilege, your experience that day, I got goosebumps just imagining it. Is there a transcript, audio, or video of the event in existence?