Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Proactive Involvement

Summary: Proactive involvement culls last, takeaway place amid 10 queries collected by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking in Brief Answers to Big Questions.

Stephen Hawking's "spark of enquiry and wonder" impelled him toward proactive involvement in understanding nature: Stephen Hawking @Stephen Hawking, via Facebook April 12, 2016

Proactive involvement, as the last of 10 asked and answered questions by a world-renowned theoretical physicist, associates action and activism with awareness in the last work for Bantam Books Oct. 15, 2018.

Stephen Hawking (Jan. 8, 1942-March 14, 2018) bases Chapter 10 in Brief Answers to the Big Questions upon the query "How Do We Shape the Future?" The co-author, with Thomas Hertog at the University of Leuven, Belgium, of the posthumous A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation? April 27, 2018, considers informed ingenuity. Hawking designates Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) a role model who "revolutionized our understanding of space, time, energy and matter" through "intuition, originality, brilliance."

Imagination enabled the Nobel Laureate to expose underlying structures and extract reality from appearances to elucidate special relativity theory from envisioning light as a frozen wave.

Laser Interferometer Gravitation-Wave Observatory experiments, particle accelerators, space telescopes and supercomputers furnish "greater tools for discovery" that Einstein-like imagination, ingenuity and inquisitiveness funnel in survival-friendly fashions.

Hawking gleaned from getting clockwork and electric toy trains into pieces and back together again that "If you know how something works, you can control it." The Princeton University theorist of space-time relativity and the Cambridge University theorist of space-time origins harnessed their mental potential to "[t]he spark of enquiry and wonder." St. Albans schoolteacher Dikran Tahta initiated Hawking's spark with "maths as the blueprint of the universe itself" since behind every exceptional individual is an exceptional instructor.

Cutbacks, nationalism and quantity-framed, not quality-framed, "rote-learning, equations and examinations" jeopardize proactive involvement from judicious science and technology in mass-audience, one-way articles, books, documentaries and films.

Science-related technology keeps up Large Hadron Collider experiments on Higgs boson particles that kindle all physical forces, without keeping down over-competition, over-population, over-production, over-use and over-warming.

Curing and treating cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy, single-gene conditions; mining rare lunar metals; setting up Martian outposts loom high on science and technology bucket lists. Artificial intelligence and space exploration respectively maneuver scientific and technological mastery toward mitigating climate change, global warming and polar meltdowns and moving away from mangled Earth. Perhaps intelligent life necessarily nestles into narrow temporal niches through natural instability, short-sightedness and self-destruction, such as earthly intelligence nudging planetary necropsis from planet-wide nuclear war.

Task-oriented artificial intelligence offers proactive involvement digital personal assistants Cortana, Google Now and Siri and self-driving cars even as it operates competitively, perhaps conflictually, with humankind.

Proactive involvement prompts brain interfaces and Facebook and disabled-friendly and then mainstream-use drive by wire, home automation, the Segway, text to voice and voice to text.

Imaginative, informed, ingenious proactive involvement queues up such other humankind-friendly scientific and technological achievements as the internet, mobile phones, medical imaging, satellite navigation and social networks. It requires interactive internet education, professionalization and socialization and mass-audience scientific literacy early on even if self-designed super-elites and super-intelligent artificial intelligence never reveal humankind-unfriendly agendas. It suggests solving the 10 big questions, spreading out from "small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded" Earth and switching to clean-energy electric transportation and fusion power.

Proactive involvement turns into practice the Einsteinian ingenuity that "a new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels."

Stephen Hawking pinpointed an integral quality of German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) accordingly: "When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind;" Albert Einstein and his sister, Maja (Nov. 18, 1881-June 25, 1951), in 1885; Library of the ETH Zurich: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Acknowledgment

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

Image credits:

Stephen Hawking's "spark of enquiry and wonder" impelled him toward proactive involvement in understanding nature: Stephen Hawking @Stephen Hawking, via Facebook April 12, 2016, @ https://www.facebook.com/stephenhawking/photos/a.722563527830747/1004427326311031/

Stephen Hawking pinpointed an integral quality of German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) accordingly: "When I think about ingenuity, Einstein springs to mind;" Albert Einstein and his sister, Maja (Nov. 18, 1881-June 25, 1951), in 1885; Library of the ETH Zurich: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons @ https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ETH-BIB-Einstein,_Albert_(1879-1955),_Winteler-Einstein,_Maja_(1881-1951)-Portrait-Portr_03143-A.tif

For further information:

Hawking, Stephen. 2018. "[Chapter] 10: How Do We Shape the Future?" Brief Answers to the Big Questions. New York NY: Bantam Books.

Hawking, Stephen; and Thomas Hertog. 27 April 2018. "A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation?" Journal of High Energy Physics 2018(147). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP04(2018)147
Available via Springer @ https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FJHEP04%282018%29147

Marriner, Derdriu. 18 October 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Scientific Literacy." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 25 October 2018. "Brief Answers to Big Questions: Divine Creation, Scientific Creation?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/10/brief-answers-to-big-questions-divine.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 1 November 2018. "Cosmological Beginnings in Hawking's Brief Answers to Big Questions." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/cosmological-beginnings-in-hawkings.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 8 November 2018. "Intelligent Life in Stephen Hawking's Brief Answers to Big Questions." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/intelligent-life-in-stephen-hawkings.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 15 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Predictable Futures?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 22 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Black Hole Interiors." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_22.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 29 November 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions:  Time Travel." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/11/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_29.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 6 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Doomsday Earth?" Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_6.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 13 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Space Colonization." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_13.html

Marriner, Derdriu. 20 December 2018. "Hawking's Brief Answers to the Big Questions: Artificial Intelligence." Earth and Space News. Thursday.
Available @ https://earth-and-space-news.blogspot.com/2018/12/hawkings-brief-answers-to-big-questions_20.html

Stephen Hawking @stephenhawking. 12 April 2016 · "Today, at the One World Observatory in New York City, Yuri Milner and I launched a mission to the stars. Mark Zuckerberg lent his support by joining the board of our new initiative, Breakthrough Starshot. Within the next generation, Breakthrough Starshot aims to develop a ‘nanocraft’ -- a gram-scale robotic space probe -- and use a light beam to push it to 20 percent of the speed of light. If we are successful, a flyby mission could reach Alpha Centauri about 20 years after launch, and send back images of any planets discovered in the system. Albert Einstein once imagined riding on a light beam, and his thought experiment led him to the theory of special relativity. A little over a century later, we have the chance to attain a significant fraction of that speed: 100 million miles an hour. Only by going that fast can we reach the stars on the time-scale of a human life. It is exciting to be involved in such an ambitious project, pushing the boundaries of ingenuity and engineering. - SH." Facebook.
Available @ https://www.facebook.com/stephenhawking/photos/a.722563527830747/1004427326311031/