15 of the Best Examples of Stephen Hawking's Brilliance

Design News honors the memory of famed physicist Stephen Hawking with a list of some of his best books, lectures, research papers, and even pop culture appearances.
  • On Wednesday March 14th the world lost its most famous living physicist. Dr. Stephen Hawking, most noted for his contributions to astrophysics and for popularizing many concepts of cosmology and physics, died at the age of 76 in his home in Cambridge, England.

    At 22 Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease that left him nearly completely paralyzed. He was given only two years to live, but he would go on to live another 54 years. During that time he would publish a body of work that would become seminal works in the sciences of physics, cosmology, astrophysics, and quantum mechanics. Hawking spent the majority of his life confined to a wheelchair and forced to speak via a computerized synthesizer. Despite this he was an active speaker and ambassador for the sciences, helping the public at large understand complex and often seemingly incomprehensible subject matter.

    He also achieved a level of celebrity due to his TV appearances, not only on his own programs but regularly on news shows as well as popular animated shows such as Futurama and The Simpsons.

    On Hawking's passing, another noted physicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, offered these words via Twitter: “His passing has left an intellectual vacuum in his wake. But it's not empty. Think of it as a kind of vacuum energy permeating the fabric of spacetime that defies measure. Stephen Hawking, RIP 1942-2018.”

    Prof Hawking leaves behind a legacy and body of work that will surely inspire and educate generations of future scientists and engineers. Here we honor his legacy with a list of 15 of his best works. If you haven't exposed yourself to any of Hawking's work, any of these would be a great place to start.

    You can view a full list of Stephen Hawking's lectures and publications on his official website.

    Click “next” above to start the slideshow.

  • A Brief History of Time

    Hawking's most well-known book, first published in 1988, is a treatise on every aspect of the idea of the time. When did time begin? Is time travel possible? What is string theory? Hawking draws from the works of luminaries such as Newton and Einstein, then formulates his own theories on time and its relationship to the universe.

    [image source: Bantam books]

  • A Smooth Exit from Eternal Inflation

    From 2017, Hawking's last publish paper continues his work into the theory of inflation – the idea that the universe is forever expanding and has been doing so since the Big Bang. From the paper's abstract: “The usual theory of inflation breaks down in eternal inflation. We derive a dual description of eternal inflation in terms of a deformed CFT located at the threshold of eternal inflation. The partition function gives the amplitude of different geometries of the threshold surface in the no-boundary state. Its local and global behavior in dual toy models shows that the amplitude is low for surfaces which are not nearly conformal to the round three-sphere and essentially zero for surfaces with negative curvature. Based on this we conjecture that the exit from eternal inflation does not produce an infinite fractal-like multiverse, but is finite and reasonably smooth.”

    [image source: Arxiv.org]

  • Does God Play Dice?

    Can we predict the future? Or is every occurrence random? In this 1999 lecture Hawking offers his thoughts on our relationship with the future, drawing on histories of ancient societies for whom natural disasters and diseases could only be avoided or assuaged by courting divine favor.

    [image source: Pixabay]

  • The Doomsday Prediction

    How much time do we have left here on Earth? Less than any of us would like. One of Hawking's most eye-raising and controversial predictions came in 2017 when he talked about the impact of climate change, disease, and technology and predicted that humans must be prepared to leave Earth in the next 100 years if we are going to survive as a species.

    [image source: BBC Earth Lab]

  • Giving Stephen Hawking a Voice

    Over his lifetime Hawking became synonymous with the synthesized robotic voice he used to communicate – to the point any sort of computer-made voice was often called “a Stephen Hawking voice.” This article from Wired delves into the history of Intel's work to give Stephen Hawking his voice and how working with Hawking has led to breakthroughs that are allowing ALS patients everywhere to better communicate.

    [image source: By Doug Wheller [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons]

  • The George Series

    Hawking co-wrote a series of children's books with his daughter Lucy. Each book in the five-part George series finds its titular hero exploring some aspect of cosmology while on a grand adventure. The first book in the series, George's Secret Key to the Universe, finds George and his best friend, Annie, traveling to other planets via black holes thanks to a powerful super computer.

    [image source: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers]

  • God Created the Integers

    In this book Hawking examines what he believes to be history's greatest works in the field of mathematics. The book spans 2500 years of mathematical discovery and examines the works of noted mathematicians such as Euclid, Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Augustin Cauchy, Bernard Riemann and Alan Turing.

    [image source: Running Press Adult]

  • Hawking vs. Artificial Intelligence

    Stephen Hawking was an outspoken figure when it came to emerging technologies. In 2014 he sparked widespread debate when he cautioned that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to the end of the human race.

    [image source: BBC News]

  • Into a Black Hole 

    One of Hawking's last published lectures from 2008. Here Hawking examines the possibility of a multiverse and whether black holes could be portals into another universe. Can anything ever escape a black hole? This lecture is Black Holes 101 as taught by Stephen Hawking.

    [image source: Pixabay]

  • Into the Universe

    In 2010 Stephen Hawking hosted a three-part miniseries on the Discovery Channel, Into the Universe with Stephen Hawking. Episodes explored the possibilities of extraterrestrial life, time travel, and one was ominously titled, “The Story of Everything.” Episodes of the series are still available online and it's worth a watch to see Hawking at his best making complex concepts accessible to a mass audience.

    [image source: Discovery Channel]

  • Life in the Universe 

    In this talk from 1996, Hawking speculates on the possibility of the existence of alien life and how intelligent life develops. “I shall take this to include the human race, even though much of its behavior throughout history, has been pretty stupid, and not calculated to aid the survival of the species,” Hawking wrote.

    [image source: Pixabay]

  • On the Shoulders of Giants

    Drawing from original papers from seminal scientists including Einstein, Copernicus, Galilei, Kepler, and Newton, Hawking explains how the works of each of these mean changed the course of physics and astronomy, and the impact their work still has on modern science.

    [image source: Running Press Adult]

  • Pop Culture

    Stephen Hawking appeared in a number of TV shows as himself, even appearing on several episodes of The Simpsons. On the day of Hawking's death Matt Selman, Executive Producer of The Simpsons, tweeted, “Farewell to Stephen Hawking, the most intelligent guest star in the brief history of The Simpsons.”

    But perhaps no interview best shows Hawking's wit and sense of humor than this 2014 appearance on Last Week with John Oliver, where he goes toe-to-toe with the comedian while still covering topics like artificial intelligence and parallel universes.

    [image source: HBO]

  • Properties of Expanding Universes

    Everyone enjoys a good origin story. This is Hawking's original PhD thesis from the University of Cambridge, published in 1966. In it he examines some of the implications and consequences of the idea of an ever-expanding universe from its impact on gravitation theory to the occurrence of spacetime singularities.

    [image source: University of Cambridge]

  • TED Talks

    Stephen Hawking spoke was a TED speaker, not once, but twice, delivering short, but insightful talks on the basics of cosmology and physics. His first talk "Questioning the Universeexplores some of the biggest questions about our universe – when and how did it begin? How did life begin? Is alien life real? While his second talk "Why Exploring Space Matters" discusses our fascination with the cosmos and how technology is bringing us closer to unlocking its secrets.

    [image source: TED Talks]

Stephen Hawking urged us to be very cautious with artificial intelligence. One of the major hassles of Deep Learning is the need to fully retrain the network on the server every time new data becomes available in order to preserve the previous knowledge. This is called "catastrophic forgetting," and it severely impairs the ability to develop a truly autonomous AI (artificial intelligence). This problem is solved by simply training on the fly — learning new objects without having to retrain on the old. Join  Neurala’s Anatoly Gorshechnikov  at ESC Boston, Wednesday, April 18, at 1 pm , where he will discuss how state-of-the-art accuracy, as well as real-time performance suitable for deployment of AI directly on the edge, moves AI out of the server room and into the hands of consumers, allowing for technology that mimics the human brain.

Chris Wiltz is a Senior Editor at  Design News  covering emerging technologies including AI, VR/AR, and robotics.

March 14, 2018

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