Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Stephen Hawking through my eyes

Write a reflection on what I just read (Chapters 2-6 and a little of 7)

Stephen Hawking started out as just a mid-range student, in England he was in the “Academic school, section 1” which was for the smart people. He applied to Oxford at 17, “I took the test, and I thought I failed because all the professors talked to other students, never me, but a week later I received a letter stating that I received a scholarship to Oxford.” This started his career as a mathematician. He studied under Dennis Sciama “Sciama was usually around and available to talk, unlike other professors.” Sciama introduced him to the field of cosmology, where he expanded on definitions of black holes, quasars, and other phenomena in space. “I realized that I could apply to black holes the causal structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. In particular, the area of the horizon, the boundary of the black hole, would always increase.” He realized this while getting into bed, just after his daughter Lucy was born.

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