Coincidentally today is Pi Day and Albert Einstein’s Birthday. Also today the universe lost a very special cosmic mind, Professor Stephen Hawking. His Birthday is the same day Galileo Galilei passed away. Hawking was an inspiration to many. His contributions to science were magnificent and will continue to be tranforming. His legacy will live on to the ends of space, time and beyond.
For me Hawking was not just one of my childhood heroes, he was also living proof of someone who lived his one brief life being grateful and appreciative for experiencing the cosmos for what it really is. I was 16 years old when I first read Hawking’s book “A Brief History of Time”. I was already in love with the universe but it was Hawking that made me fall in love with Cosmology. A journey that lead me to study Astrophysics. A journey that will always continue to the stars and be my defining passion to know the cosmos.
Hawking aspired for the theory of everything. His life’s work is a story of hope and wonder. He lived to tell us the greatest story ever told…the story of the universe. Ultimately the story of the universe is the story of all of us on this tiny speck among the stars. Hawking was like a child exploring an enchanted forest, playing in the cosmos, discovering the true magic of all of time and space – science of the universe.
On a side note since it is also Pi Day, in the novel “Contact” written by another one of my childhood heroes, Carl Sagan, who also wrote a heartfelt forward to the first edition of Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time”, Pi had a very special meaning. *SPOILER* In the novel “Contact”, the transcendental number Pi contained a hidden message in it’s sequence that all of the advanced alien civilizations struggled so far to decipher yet it was a message so distinct it implied the unification of everything and how everything was connected beyond our current understanding…like a theory of everything.
I am grateful to Hawking for everything he was and for everything he did for our understanding of the universe. His dream to understand why the universe exists as it is and why exist at all is also my dream and the dream of everyone who wander in the cosmic playground. Hawking would want us all to celebrate the universe after his passing, to keep looking up at the stars, to venture beyond the spacetime singularity of our minds and unlock the mysteries of the universe.
Rest in peace professor Hawking. You are one with the cosmos now.
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“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
– Stephen Hawking
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