Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Scientific Literacy

Summary: Technological and scientific literacy for mass audiences reveals why Stephen Hawking responds to 10 inquiries in Brief Answers to the Big Questions.

Stephen Hawking, pursuing his "spark of enquiry and wonder": Steve Elliott (jabberwock), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Mass technological and scientific literacy activates a world-renowned physicist asking and answering 10 questions about the origin and fate of the universe for a posthumous publication by Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) balances elitist and mass technological and scientific literacy in his introductory chapter Why We Must Ask the Big Questions. His Brief Answers to the Big Questions contains a note from the publishers, foreword by Eddie Redmayne, introduction by Kip Thorne and afterword by Lucy Hawking. Redmayne declares of Hawking, "We have lost a truly beautiful mind, an astonishing scientist and the funniest man I have ever had the pleasure to meet."

The Academy Award-winning Hawking interpreter, in 2014, second after Benedict Cumberbatch in 2004, evokes 44th United States President (Jan. 20, 2009-Jan. 20, 2017) Barack Obama's tweet.

President Obama furnished Hawking with the Presidential Medal of Freedom Aug. 12, 2009, and farewells March 14, 2018, to "Have fun out there among the stars."

The interment ceremony June 15, 2018, at Westminster Abbey in London, England, grounded into real-time the presidential greeting and the theoretician's goal "to fly into space." The European Space Agency Cerberos station, 1,056.33-plus miles (1,700-plus kilometers) southward, headed Hawking's voice, held within a 6.5-minute electronic-music composition by Vangelis (Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou) spaceward. Lucy Hawking indicated, "It is a message of peace and hope, about unity and the need for us to live together in harmony on this planet."

The Hawking voice journeys on radio waves 3,500 light years (20,575,188,806,142,628 miles; 33,112,556,654,030,000 kilometers) to the dark star 1A 0620-00, nearest black hole to the Earth.

Kip Thorne, Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, kept to dark stars and their detectable gravitational waves in his introduction.

The Hawking headstone at Westminster Abbey forever links the gravitational-wave detector co-designer with Gary Gibbons, 20-plus years before the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, to dark stars. It memorializes the Hawking entropy equation on particle randomness as proportional to surface area, just as the Hawking memorial stone in Cambridge, England, manifests another equation. The Hawking temperature equation on weight inversely proportional to temperature in black holes nestles into the Hawking memorial stone at his Gonville and Caius College workplace.

Black holes and dark stars occur in Hawking's introduction and ten chapters, all of which occasion the Hawking mission and vision: mass-audience technological and scientific literacy.

Pursuit of technological and scientific literacy prompted the author of My Brief History Sept. 10, 2013, to participate on social media and publish in popular science.

Hawking queues up,  through filmed and published works, quests for understanding the evolving universe where Earth and earthling animals qualify as visible matter and intelligent life. He remained illiterate until his eighth year; reckoned red-shifted waves as light reeling from fatigue, not running from the Big Bang; revealed mediocrity in pre-university schooling. Stress upon inquisitiveness and technological and scientific literacy from his parents served Hawking well in shaping his dream that "I wanted to be a great scientist."

Scientific literacy touches "all time travellers, journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit."

"The doorway under the light in the distance leads to Stephen Hawking's office;" Caius Court, part of Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England; Saturday, Jan. 3, 2009: Ed Brambley (edbrambley), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Stephen Hawking, pursuing his "spark of enquiry and wonder": Steve Elliott (jabberwock), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/jabberwock/8478523907/

"The doorway under the light in the distance leads to Stephen Hawking's office;" Caius Court, part of Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England; Saturday, Jan. 3, 2009: Ed Brambley (edbrambley), CC BY SA 2.0 Generic, via Flickr @ https://www.flickr.com/photos/edbrambley/3162299605/

For further information:

Hawking, Stephen. 2010. My Brief History. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "Why We Must Ask the Big Questions." Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.