Headline, June27, 2013

'''TIME - TRUMPETS -TIDE -TEARS'''

Every summer, students were packed off to Yorkshire, where there were forced marches and shooting competitions at which young Stephen Hawking was plainly hopeless. And not far from St Albans was his parents house.

''Plaster leaked from the holes in the walls, it really did.'' recalls the Music critic Michael Church, who was classmate both in High School and at Oxford. And Stephen Hawking wasn't overly concerned about appearance either. At 15, his world was rocked when he learned that the universe was expanding.

''I was sure there must be some mistake,'' Hawking would later recall. ''A static universe seemed so much more natural. It could have existed and could continue to exist forever. But an expanding universe would change with time.'' Very likely it had a beginning, the teenager realized. And ''if it continued to expand it would virtually become empty.''

Such were his obsessions.

On his 60th birthday, Professor Hawking proved a brave and hearty host. As everyone knew he was engaged at that time in an endeavor far greater than merely cheating death. He intended to be the first to reconcile Albert Einstein's theory of relativity with Max Planck's quantum mechanics, which governs atomic and subatomic particles.

Dubbed optimistically ''The Theory of Everything,'' its formulation escaped even Einstein. But its current chief crusader was, as always, engagingly upbeat. This was the holy grail. ''A complete theory of the basic laws of the universe.'' Hawking had once hoped, could be formulated by 2020. Earlier he had bet on the year 2000.

Professor Hawking was sure that it would lead to a ''complete understanding of the universe,.......why it is as it is and why it exists at all.'' As an old idealist, Hawking thrilled to such a future. With a complete theory at hand, cosmology would no longer be confined to the high priests of science. '' Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion.'' he promised at the end of his best-seller.

And nor are such extravagant hopes confined to him. ''We will discover eventually why there's a universe,'' Hawking's friend Rocky Kolb, of the Fermi Lab, assured:

''The laws of the universe tell you, if you start out with truly nothing, this is unstable and will decay into something. Yes, the universe is inevitable. Nothing cannot exist forever.''

''I usually wear my Zen robes when I talk that way.'' Many cosmologists ......Hawking especially.........deploy humor with calculation, using it as a method of fraternization with the uninitiated, blunting the resentment of the bewildered. 

So, for its biggest celebrity, Cambridge University laid on a week's worth of festivities, to which some of the world's top scientists and academics flocked.

The blackhole physicist Kip thorne of Caltech, who has said he would rank Hawking, ''besides Einstein, as the best in our field,'' came, as did Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, who counts Hawking as a close friend.

But tragically. soon thereafter, Dr Stephen Hawking's private and personal world changed for the worse. And somehow, with it -after extracting its toll, the British Newpapers ardor for pursuing Hawking's  predicaments, dampened. Instead, interest and stories again began to revolve around Hawking's longtime dream : The Theory of Everything

The Master Cosmologist, by then had abandoned his Quest : ''Some people will be very disappointed,'' he acknowledged, ''but I have changed my mind.''

''Like a recanting heretic,'' suggested The Sunday Time Magazine. And it contained a particularly hurtful passage about the scientist and his ''not appetizing'' lack of ''Lip Control'' while he eats his dinner.

From his hospital bed, Hawking listened as a friend read this passage out loud to him.

A tear rolled down his face.

With respectful dedication to Sir Issac Newton.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless