“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet” Stephen Hawking

It is my little sisters birthday today and because I am in that mood I thought I would let you all in on my Stephen Hawking Geek Out.  The man is a legend in the Scientific World and I am honored to have met him only three years ago, definitely one of the high-lights of my career so far.

This is, of course, Stephen Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist, who was born on 8 January 1942. His life and celebrity are hard to seperate from the astounding story of how he echieved such feats while living with a form of motor neurone disease. He was famously diagnosed aged just 21 and given just a few years to live by doctors. He is still here and going strong. Amazing.

On the 8th of January 2012, Professor Hawking celebrated his 70th birthday.  Eminent physicists from around the globe descended on Cambridge to honour one of their own and celebrate the life of the world’s most famous living scientist. The Cambridge cosmologist has worked on the inflation of the early universe and a quantum theory of gravity, and famously suggested that black holes emit radiation and so slowly disappear. A Brief History of Time has sold more than 10m copies worldwide. Click on the link to get your own copy.

To coincide with Professor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, in conjunction with Intel, hosted a public symposium entitled ‘The State of the Universe’. Watch the video below, and listen to the man himself speak, it is actually amazing.

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The Professor also had a guest appearance on episodes of The Simpsons and Star Trek in which Data plays poker with Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. Genius!

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Happy Belated Birthday Professor Hawking, thank you for sharing your light.

E