Stephen Hawking’s wisdom brought amazing change

Jeff Rodgers’ recent farewell to cosmologist Stephen Hawking in the Bradenton Herald struck a chord.

I spent my senior year of college in the mid-’70s doing an independent study of black holes. As part of my research, I read Hawking’s original writings in the Astrophysical Journal.

Then, black holes were still a theory not having been observed directly or indirectly. The math of the time restricted most discussion to the simplest possibility: a single star collapsed to a perfect sphere that did not rotate. One famous astrophysicist described such a black hole as “having no hair,” i.e., there was no information or communication or leftover light coming from it.

How far we have come in 40 years — thanks, in large part, to Stephen Hawking and the power of his imagination.

Now we know, for instance, that massive black holes lie at the center of the Milky Way galaxy and many others.

We’ve seen the result of black holes colliding and generating an even more esoteric, nearly unbelievable, phenomenon: gravity waves. At least two have rippled through the Earth recently.

The confirmation of the Higgs boson a few years ago has unified particle theory and brought us incredibly closer to that merger of understanding between the very small and the very large.

Truly outstanding, amazing progress.

As I worked my way through that independent study, my professor had a word of advice that echoed Hawking: If I couldn’t explain the physics of black holes to the person on the street, then I really didn’t know what I was talking about. (I think he saw my limitations in that paper.)

His was a great piece of advice that carried over into all the writing I did later in marketing, public relations and even my fiction and poetry.

Rodgers’ column reflects the same desire and ability to make the complicated understandable.

We will miss Stephen Hawking. But his words for both the most and least knowledgeable about science will stay with us for a very long time.

This story was originally published March 23, 2018 at 12:29 PM with the headline "Stephen Hawking’s wisdom brought amazing change."